On the Peculiarity of the Realization of the Event Text in Nikolai A. Markevich’s Memoirs

Abstract

This article aims to show how the unpublished memoirs of Nikolai A. Markevich created mythologized representations of Russian literature of the 1810‒1820s, which formed a peculiar event epochal supertext of the literary process of that time. The introduction briefly presents the theoretical foundations of the study. In particular, it points out the peculiarities of such a form of event supertext as an epochal text. The aim of the article is to show how in Markevich’s memoirs, and especially in the part entitled “Russia, Petersburg, Literature 1817–1820”, the author’s mythology is formed, how thanks to Markevich’s skill as a memoirist an emotional perception of the epoch and historical personalities takes place. To achieve the set goal, the cultural-historical, typological, mythopoetic and structuralist methods of literary studies are used. Markevich’s “Notes”, like any memoir documents, are a unique testimony of the epoch. However, it is in these “Notes” that the author manages not only to record historical and literary events, but also to give them an emotional background, which undoubtedly creates the author’s myth about the historical time; he does not just write about the peculiarities of this or that historical personality, but often offers such an individual perspective that contradicts traditional and established assessments. The article notes that two narrative techniques — apologetics and irony — contribute to the mythologisation of the cultural and literary environment of the epoch considered by the memoirist. It is shown how the notes of Markevich conceptually in memorable constant mythologized forms reproduce the idea of the literary process of this period, that is, they create signs for the perceiving consciousness, which, having fixed in Russian literature, form the epochal event text of Russian literature of Pushkin’s epoch.

Keywords:

supertext, event text, Pushkin epoch text, crossheading of a newspaper text, mythologisation, Nikolai A. Markevich, memoir notes