“The Dispute on Russia” in the Book “Temptation by the Revolution” (2009) by Vladimir Sharov: Tradition and Discourse

Abstract

This article examines the literary and critical heritage of Vladimir Sharov (1952-2018), a contemporary writer and historian. When analyzing his texts in the postmodern paradigm, the authors focus on the urgent literary-theoretical problem of the relationship between genre and discursive traditions. The methodological basis of this research includes M. M. Bakhtin’s idea of separating compositional and architectonic forms in a literary work that opens a new correlation of diachronic and synchronous approaches. The research is based on the book “Temptation by the Revolution” (2009) by Vladimir Sharov, as well as on some metatexts of the 19th century. (P. Ya. Chaadaev, N. I. Nadezhdin, V. G. Belinsky). The research subject is Sharov’s historical narrative and its discursive characteristics. The authors show that substantive-semantic, lexical-grammatical, and stylistic features of V. Sharov’s book revealed by the analysis indicate its affinity to the discourse of the “dispute on Russia” that developed in the 19th century (discussions around the “First Philosophical Letter” by P. Ya. Chaadaev). A comparative analysis results in the main conclusion: at the level of external, compositional forms of text, V. Sharov’s discourse is formed as a part of the historical novel tradition, and at the level of architectonics, implicitly, refers to the discourse of the “dispute on Russia” and is built as its continuation, as a polylogue. It follows that the genre tradition and the discourse tradition interact in the book of V. Sharov ambivalently, and this is fixed in the structure of the narrative itself: the discourse organizes architectonics, the genre organizes the compositional unity of the text. The authors believe that the form of the classical heritage reception presented in the book “Temptation by the Revolution” by Vladimir Sharov, outlines additional opportunities for the study of his historical novels. This is a new and creative actualization form of Russian classics, produced by the writer and constituting a distinctive feature of his discourse.