ПОХОРОНЫ РОМАНА Н. КОНОНОВА ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЙ КРИТИКОЙ (К ВОПРОСУ О РЕЦЕПЦИИ «ПОХОРОН КУЗНЕЧИКА»)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of production of the book value, faith in its value, carried out by literary critique as an Institute of the literary field. The material is the critical reception of Nikolai Kononov’s novel “The Funeral of a grasshopper”. Published in 2000, the novel gets the small Apollon Grigoriev’s Award (not the big one) and is included in a short list of The Russian Booker Prize, but does not win. The aim of the research is to study the role of critique in the fate of the Kononov’s novel. According to the author of article, literary critique has generated interest in the work of the writer, and has “buried” it. The methodological basis of the work is the position of receptive aesthetics and sociology of literature. The author studies pragmatic strategies of both positive and negative critique of the novel: giving the book the status of exclusive (in terms of content, poetics, produced effect) or banal text. The author concludes that the positive critique devoted to the novel is wordy, metalogical (the criticism is infected by Kononov’s style), often turns into a retelling. Negative critical judgment, the accusations of lack of originality and the banality of the idea, also contributed to the novel’s “funeral” and undermined the symbolic value of the text.