Memoir essay as a document of fiction

Abstract

The article explores the memoir essay as a journalistic genre combining documentary and fictional elements. The study is based on the books of memoirs by B. Zaitsev, M. Nesterov and S. Rachmaninov. The analysis of memoir texts by people of creative professions makes it possible to identify the features of the synthesis of two narrative components and to determine the individual author’s approach to the disclosure of the characters’ personality.As a result of the comparative, compositional, stylistic and contextual analysis, we have come to the following conclusions: the artistic and journalistic portrait essay fully retains its genre features only in B. Zaitsev’s book “The Distant Land“, the books of two other authors contain portrait characteristics and sketches as compositional elements in the biographical and autobiographical essay. However, the fictional images created by the memoirists contribute to the strengthening of the documentary nature, vividly, clearly and realistically recreating people and their era, despite the inevitable memoir subjectivism.It is difficult to distinguish between the fictional and documentary sides of the text. In the journalistic text, each of them confirms the dual nature of the essay genre, which is at the intersection of documentary and fictional literature.