Abstract
The essay “The Imperative of Unreliability: Narrating Pushkin's The Shot” explores the narrative techniques of Pushkin's novella “The Shot”. As we demonstrate, none of the designated or implied narrators assume responsibility for the information they report, its biases or implications. Moreover, independently of its proclaimed source any reported information can be compromised in a variety of ways: established narrative knowledge can be ridiculed and undermined; the imperative of reliability discarded; incompatible stylistic modes combined. All of this can be accompanied by a more or a less manifest subversive presence of the meta-narrator. The novella is permeated by a series of narrative and stylistic shifts which inescapably relegate the plot and its main elements into the realm of fictionality and decoordinate the narration itself. Pushkin's narrative experiment may be interpreted in light of Friedrich Schlegel's theory of the novella as an anecdote “narrated in the fashion of high society”, so that the value of commonplace plots is restored through the mode of story-telling.
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