Theoretical Aspect of Studying the Literary Utopias and Dystopias of the First Decades of the 20th Century (on the Genre Identification Problem)

Abstract

This article examines the theoretical problems of studying literary utopias and dystopias. Since utopia and dystopia exist far beyond fiction, it is proposed to approach the analysis of a literary work as a particular case of the manifestation of a universal model of utopian/dystopian consciousness. First, in the texts under consideration, their elements should be identified with the support of research in social philosophy — the structure of utopian consciousness is outlined in the article, and the structure of dystopian consciousness is derived by the author of the article by analogy. If a work shows signs of utopian or dystopian consciousness, the next step in working with the text is to compare its genre features with the established genre invariant developed by literary critics. The article also presents the corresponding conditionally universal genre models of utopia and dystopia. This approach allows, firstly, to reasonably attribute the work to utopias and dystopias in the presence of signs of utopian or dystopian consciousness, secondly, to expand the body of texts that can be considered utopias or dystopias, and, finally, to fix individual genre features and correlate them with the corresponding invariant. During the formation of the genre of literary dystopia, i.e. in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the diversity of genre features in national literatures was extensive, this algorithm helps to fully trace the formation of the national invariant of the genre and establish its national specifics. At the same time, destroyed by the twentieth century, the genre of “classical utopia” is reborn and significantly modified under the influence of the novel form, so the identification of literary utopia becomes difficult — in this situation, the combination of philosophical and literary methods considered in the article also seems productive.