Полиморфизм жанра "биографической прозы" Марины Цветаевой

Abstract

The object of consideration is a cycle of works by Marina Tsvetaeva (Your Death, Captive Spirit, Hero of Labor, Natalia Gontcharova, The Living about the Living, An Otherworldly Evening, The History of a Dedication), which can be described — generalizing from the suggestions of researchers working in this field — as "biographical prose.” In the present article, in relation to the prose of Tsvetaeva, this term is adopted only as a matter of eonvention, solely for methodologicał purposes. This created the possibility of analyzing the enumerated works in the eontext of group of generic properties (mainly of the literary portrait), which, as follows from existing geneological determinations, are eonsidered to be prevalent in their poetics, though in the opinion of the author this does not seem legitimate. Already on the basis of a comparative analysis of the titles of the literary portraits of e.g. M. Gorky and the works of Tsvetaeva, the prose of the poet scems to be a phenomenon much more complex than the genre with which it is usually connected. The title in the literary portrait occurs as a personal name, denotes a historie character, of an individual nature, already at the beginning it relates the reader to the extraliterary reality connected with the character mentioned in the title —the designate. The forms of the titles in the prose of Tsvetaeva have, however, an unequivocal character. Through their eonnotations they signalize, and symbolically expose, the universal values of the fictional world, express the significant elements of the author's vision of reality, the concepts of an artist and of art, suggest tho immanent way of reading the prose as the most appropriate. The significant differences in the structure of the literary portrait and the prose of Tsvetaeva have been brought out during the analysis of the narrative structure and of the fictional worlds of the works compared. The narrative structure of the literary portrait as a genre of memoir prose reflects the successively growing, the ever fuller and deeper knowledge of the narrator about the portrayed character, the portrait of whom is somehow ereated under the gaze of the reader, through an accumulation of the layers of the successive dramatized presentations, and it is formed on the basis of a similarity to the real prototype. The narration here clearly points to the character of reporting (which is proved, among other things, by the frequent recalling of historical time). In the narration of Tsvetaeva, however, what is exposed is the simultaneity of the act of perception and realization, recollection and creative interpretation. The narration here helps not so much to relate the events, as to get to know, in a secondary way, the recollected reality and its universalization, as an effect of which almost every element of the fietional world acquires an ontical dual meaning. The general orientation of the narrator during the selection and organization of material (of a recollective character) based upon the reality already structured (in a myth, literary legend, environmental legend, folk belief, belle-lettres, psychophilosophical conception of a mythological character) constitutes the most significant element determin - ing the structural properties of the prose in question, its polemical character in relation to the cognitive and stylistic assumptions of literary biography. The thesis of the generic polymorphism of the prose of Tsvetaeva is confirmed by an analysis of the relation designated „the narrator versus the characters” in the work cycle in question. Investigations in this direction would allow us to expose the structural differentiation of the memoirs of the poet, in which, according to the author, the two opposite genetic models —ode and epigram —w ould be actualized (depending on the character of the relation). The generie syneretism of the prose is confirmed also by the presence in the narration of Tsvetaeva of certain elements of the poeties of the obituary, epitaph, and lament, which seems to be connected with the genesis of the analyzed recollections.