Documentary principles in fiction in the light of the value-ontological approach

Abstract

The purpose of the publication is to establish the reasons for the growth of the documentary principle in fiction for over the last one and a half centuries in connection with the transformation of the semantic and value powers that the author of the work possesses. The value aspect of the documentary principle in literature is about the role the fact plays as a link with being, when the writer’s ability and his right to authoritatively act as a subject coming into contact with the cumulative experience of mankind is called into question. In the presence of the documentary principle, the result of a creative act is not a narrowly understood aesthetic product, a phenomenon of an exclusively fictitious nature realized in “autonomous being”, taken outside the “reality of births and deaths” of the author and the reader. Reliance on the fact opens up the possibility for a creative act to be realized as an event, rooted in the space of its responsibility to true being. However, the creative activity of the artist as the founder and organizer of a meaning-generating event still remains an indispensable condition for a work of art. The dialectical unity of the truth of a fact (document) and the individual creative initiative of the author is preserved in literature of a predominantly documentary nature. The author confirms the authenticity of all stamps on the document, personally and artistically ratifying it and overcoming its subjective ontological fluctuation. The formative initiative of the author also remains of paramount importance due to the fact that a direct transfer of life to paper is impossible (either because of its inexpressiveness, or, more often, due to the intolerable traumatic experience that is ousted from the bright field of the individual’s consciousness). The author provides an opportunity for the other (the reader) to have access to the “bare life”, of which he was a witness and a participant, creatively building a subject-shaped structure that ensures this accessibility. The work of V. T. Shalamov serves as a support for the ideas presented in the article.