Specificity Of Commenting On Modern Classics: V. Pelevin “The Yellow Arrow”

Abstract

The article is devoted to some problems of commenting on the works of one of the major writers in the modern literary process, Victor Pelevin. His work “The Yellow Arrow” (1993) was chosen as an example. Pelevin’s tale is a polycode structure that is built on balancing between aesthetic (sacral, esoteric) and mass (profiled, exoteric) knowledge, resulting in the effect of multilayered text organization focused on the widest possible range of readers. The story, addressed to a mass reader with completely different level of education and culture, age index, is saturated with various realities of the 1980s - 1990s era. For the 1990s reader, most of them did not require their explanation because they constituted one’s daily experience of the time. However, when reprinting Pelevin’s works at present it is necessary to take into account the rapid development of Russian history of the 20th century, especially after 1985. In addition to historical and socio-political realities, Pelevin’s story includes hidden quotes from literary and musical works relevant to characterizing the changes that took place in Russian society in the 1980s and early 1990s. These quotes, allusions, references implement the principle of intertextuality, which blasts a purely linear reading of the text and proposes to take into account the author’s dialogue (or even polylog) with the “someone else’s text”, can be considered implemented only if the reader is able to catch the very presence of the “someone else’s text”.