Storytelling, reflection and narration in Dmitry Grigorovich’s essay "Waiting for the Passage-Boat"

IF 0.2 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS
A. Kozlov
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The article analyses the essay “Waiting for the Passage-Boat” (1857) by the Russian writer and publicist Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich. The essay was published in the magazine Sovremennik (“Contemporary”), and its publication seemed to draw a line under the discussion of the slaver and serfdom question in Russian magazines. Grigorovich’s prose played a role in this discussion. Grigorovich was one of the first writers of Russian realism (the so-called “natural school”) and tried to move away from the theatre vaudeville and sentimental images of Russian peasants in his novellas The Village and Anton-Goremyka. His subsequent texts on peasant themes, written during the “gloomy seven years”, varied the source material, sometimes showing a movement towards melodrama. The article offers a variant of a narratological and hermeneutic reading of the essay in the aspect of reflection and narration. In the author’s opinion, Grigorovich demonstrates the exhaustion of the peasant theme in literature, using the technique of multiple storytelling (from Hoffmann’s Serapion Brothers or Odoevsky’s Russian Nights). This becomes most obvious at that moment of the narrative, when the “right to voice” passes to casual interlocutors, while the narrator, correlated with the writer, loses this right. He is not recognized as the author of stories in his environment and takes the passive role of a listener. The use of allusions, remeniscences (from Karamzin, Radishchev, Mérimée, de Prevost), and autoquotation creates “noise” in the communication channel, making it difficult to perceive these stories as “bitter truth” (Stendhal), at the same time convincing the reader of the impossibility of finding an adequate description language for peasant everyday life. In this regard, Grigorovich’s position coincides with that of Honore de Balzac in the introduction to his Les Paysans or of Pavel Annenkov that was declared in his main article: you can expect a lot of pleasure from the expression in art of the course of common life, many pictures, original faces, excellent descriptions, but hardly real knowledge of this course as a subject for discussion and conclusion. Yet many of the writers and a very large number of readers have in mind this latter goal; but it is the same as judging about the height of the people who built the Egyptian pyramid by the pyramid’s height. This epistemological impossibility is illustrated in Grigorovich’s essay: the nobles and the peasant world exist in parallel. Thus, interlocutors do not feel empathy, and the purpose of conversation is not to change reality, but to spend time. Thus, the conversation of the nobles can be correlated with the Socratic dialogue, in which the possibility of the maieutic acquisition of truth is not realized due to the failure of communication. The arrival of the passage-boat demonstrates the inconsistency and exhaustion of conversations about people’s happiness, becomes a marker of such a failure. The article is illustrated with fragments of critical articles and epistolary works by Grigorovich. whose 200th anniversary inspires researchers to search for the latest interpretations and update the ways of reading the writer’s texts. Results and observations that are presented in the article can be used in teaching the history of 19th-century Russian literature.
格里戈洛维奇散文《等待渡船》的叙事、反思与叙事
本文分析了俄罗斯作家、政治学家格里戈洛维奇的散文《等待船》(1857)。这篇文章发表在《当代》(Sovremennik)杂志上,它的发表似乎与俄罗斯杂志上关于奴隶制度和农奴制问题的讨论划清了界限。格里戈洛维奇的散文在这场讨论中发挥了作用。格里戈洛维奇是俄罗斯现实主义(所谓的“自然学派”)的首批作家之一,他试图在他的中篇小说《村庄》和《安东-戈雷梅卡》中摆脱戏剧杂剧和俄罗斯农民的情感形象。他在“阴郁的七年”期间撰写的关于农民主题的后续文本,改变了原始材料,有时显示出向情节剧的运动。文章从反思和叙述的角度对这篇文章进行了一种叙事学和解释学的解读。作者认为,格里戈洛维奇运用多重叙事的手法(从霍夫曼的《塞拉皮昂兄弟》到奥多耶夫斯基的《俄罗斯之夜》),展示了文学中农民主题的枯竭。这在叙述的那一刻变得最明显,当“话语权”转移到不经意的对话者时,与作者相关的叙述者失去了这一权利。在他所处的环境中,他不被认为是故事的作者,而只是一个被动的倾听者。使用暗示,回忆(来自Karamzin, Radishchev, msamrisame, de Prevost)和自动引用在交流渠道中制造了“噪音”,使得这些故事很难被理解为“痛苦的真相”(司唐达),同时说服读者不可能找到一个适当的描述农民日常生活的语言。在这方面,格里戈洛维奇的立场与巴尔扎克在他的《Paysans》的引言中或者帕维尔·安年科夫在他的主要文章中宣称的立场一致:你可以从日常生活过程的艺术表达中获得很多乐趣,许多图片,原始的面孔,出色的描述,但很难真正了解这一过程作为讨论和总结的主题。然而,许多作家和大量读者心中所想的是后一个目标;但这与根据金字塔的高度来判断建造埃及金字塔的人的高度是一样的。这种认识论上的不可能性在格里戈洛维奇的文章中得到了说明:贵族和农民世界是平行存在的。因此,对话者没有同理心,谈话的目的不是为了改变现实,而是为了消磨时间。因此,贵族的对话可以与苏格拉底的对话相关联,在苏格拉底的对话中,由于沟通的失败,无法实现对真理的maieutic acquisition的可能性。游船的到来表明了关于人们幸福的对话的不一致和疲惫,成为这种失败的标志。文章是由格里戈洛维奇的批评文章和书信体作品的片段说明。他的200周年纪念激励着研究人员去寻找最新的解读和更新阅读作者文本的方式。文章中提出的结果和观察结果可用于19世纪俄罗斯文学史的教学。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
50.00%
发文量
0
期刊介绍: Tomsk State University Journal of Philology was established with the aim of: - publishing the papers and reviews on the topical issues of modern philology: linguistics, literary studies, communication studies; - promoting the development of theoretical and practical research in the field of socio-humanitarian knowledge; - forging links among scholars from different regions of Russia and other countries. Tomsk State University Journal of Philology is an independent research journal that welcomes submissions from across the world.
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