The functions of everyday life in the story of Y. Trifonov “Exchange” and ways of depicting it

Abstract

This article proceeds from the fact that the function of everyday life in the work of Yu.V. Trifonov is determined by insufficient study, as well as the category of everyday detail itself: both in linguistic and literary works, there is a noticeable vagueness in terminology, in determining the specifics and boundaries of the detail. In linguistics, there are fluctuations from understanding a detail as a microelement of a work to including several sentences or an entire paragraph in it (the criterion is relative semantic completeness) and isolating a smaller element from the detail a detailed moment. Trifonov is scrupulous in describing the flesh of time: the appearance of household items, prices, portable items, apartment layouts. All people's connections are explicated through their life history. The author is alien to arbitrariness, the so-called artistic experiment. Trifonov's prose grows out of a memoir, a documentary testimony of an ordinary person living in history. For Trifonov, history is a closely woven network of such memoirs. Every little thing of life in Trifonov's art world is universal and multifunctional. Trifonov's multidirectional aspirations of the heroes are crossed on things; the thing checks the hero and organizes the plot. The dominant function of checking the hero enlarges the thing, gives it the status of a moral and philosophical key to the personality of the character, revealing his hidden moral potential or, on the contrary, depriving the hero of the mask of an intellectual. Thus, everyday detail, the particularity of human life, inconspicuous and at first glance insignificant, helps Trifonov to open the framework of the narrative and discover metaphysical depth in the structure of everyday life. Many critics have noted the fact that Trifonov's works are filled with everyday details, but their functions have still not been sufficiently considered.