Abstract
The paper considers the phenomenon of familiarity in the context of the carnival theory of the outstanding Russian scientist M. M. Bakhtin, whose work influenced the development of humanitarian thought in Russia and the west of the 20th century. The author of the article investigates the formation of this concept and its influence on the formation and development of the novel genre as one of the components of the folk-laughter culture. Familiarity is a free and unofficial communication without any distance or etiquette norms. Free communication allows you to retreat from the hierarchical and official relations between people. At the same time, the familiar areal speech, through which familiar communication is built, has got its own special characteristics. The speech includes curses, oath, false vows, and obscenities. Therefore, this speech is ambivalent, it is isolated and completed. They are the source of such a phenomenon as familiarity. In this case, familiarity as a category has several levels. The semantic level is associated with informality and the rejection of normativity. The verbal level consists of the specific familiar-square forms and genres, and therefore it contributes to the formation of a special unofficial language. These two levels create a collective, in which familiar treatment is possible. This collective becomes a fair, a carnival crowd. In addition, over time, forms of familiarity have become a kind of protest against the official ideological system.
Highlights
The analysis of the known set of literary devices, frequently used by one or another poet, novelist, or play-writer at the present time allows us to identify a sustained tendency towards the realization of the phenomenon which M
The familiar contact has a certain impact on the spatial and temporal relationships between the characters and the author: he lets the images of works - because of violations of the distance between them - to be in the same "image field", in addition, familiarized relationships between the author and the characters, putting them into one value-time frame that makes the free movement of the creator within the depicted world, allowing it to oppose the concept of "familiar contact" to "distant plan" (Bakhtin, 1997, p. 139)
Summarizing the above, the category of familiarity took an important place in Bakhtin's heritage: even in the 1960s, he continued to consider it in the monograph "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics"
Summary
The analysis of the known set of literary devices, frequently used by one or another poet, novelist, or play-writer at the present time allows us to identify a sustained tendency towards the realization of the phenomenon which M. With each new historical and literary stage, the author's desire to destroy the distance between himself and the reader (addressee), the reader and the text (addressee and the text), to "degrade" the generally accepted norms, sometimes to relinquish them, is becoming more noticeable, and by the end of the twentieth century – with the final formation of a new literary context of the era – without any exaggeration, is becoming one of the fundamental methods for the development that can be roughly described as the literary сannon of sociocultural consciousness in the long transition from its classical type to the non-classical one. M. Bakhtin (and in his concept of laughter and carnival culture) is taken by the category of familiarity, which, one way or another, was considered by the scientist for the whole twenty years (1940-50-ies) in the context of the very different phenomena – from the direct influence of this phenomenon on the formation of the novel genre to a seamless element of folk-laughter culture and an integral component of the carnival world perception
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