Image of the Soviet Union in Truman Capote’s work “The Muses Are Heard”

Abstract

The subject of this research is the reception of the image of the Soviet Union in the book “The Muses Are Heard" by the American writer Truman Capote. The perception of the image of “foreign” and “foreign culture” is one of the pressing problems within the modern literary studies. The goal of this work is to determine the peculiarities of literary-documentary resemblance of the image of “foreign” country based on the work “The Muses Are Heard”, which is synthetic in its genre nature. The conclusion is drawn on the genre affiliation of the book and the techniques of depicting the image of “foreign culture” therein. The novelty lies in the fact that the research of this literary work are of synoptic nature, and this article is the first attempt of revealing the specificity of the image of the USSR in this work. The author indicates that the specificity of the image of the Soviet Union in the work “The Muses Are Heard is largely determined by its complex literary-documentary nature. T. Capote sets the goal to debunk the stereotypical representations on the USSR, which have formed in the American national mentality. Moreover, the writer refers to the Soviet material as an aesthetic experiment associated with the creation of a peculiar literary-documentary narrative form. The image of the Soviet Union in the work is structured on the factual documentary basis – Capote directly observes the Soviet realities and interviews the Leningrad residents. At the same time, in creating the image of the USSR, T. Capote applies the artistic and cinematographic techniques: stylization of the narrative on behalf of the “naive narrator”, method of “gradual immersion”, cropping, “pointed camera” effect, retardation, and contrast.