Literary Eastern as an Artistic Discovery of P. K. Beletsky

The study explores genre genesis of “literary eastern”, formed in the work of P. K. Beletsky at the beginning of the 1910s, ahead of the appearance of its cinematic twin, in cultural and historical aspects. The Russian writer, who, to a certain extent, took into account the experience of creators of the Western westerns, created an “archaic” of the genre type of eastern that received further development in Russian literature and culture. The genre specificity of such works of Beletsky, traditionally defined as “novel” in the writer’s metapoetics, is manifested in the creation of a “frontier” situation, a narrative expression of cultural interaction between “civilization” and the “wild” world of the uncharted Eastern Siberian region of Russia. Unlike Western westerns, the Russian version of this type of literary work embodies the idea of achieving “common good” rather than individual egoistic success with the prospects of socially progressive and humanistic transformations. Beletsky's eastern laid the traditions of a large epic form, tracing back to the constructions of the novel type, characterized by a pronounced novelistic task, contamination of intensive (acuity of action, action scenes) and extensive (description of everyday life, wide distribution of the action) principles of constructing the plot, the homogeneousness of artistic situations, “scenaricity”, “cinematographic frameness”, ethical polarization in the character system, determination to depict “exceptional” characters and circumstances. The poetics of Beletsky’s literary eastern had an impact on the formation of “narrative formulas” of the corresponding cinema genre.