To the question of the boundaries of the fictionality of the narrated event. "Every hundred years. A novel with a diary" by A. Matveeva

Abstract

The object of research in this article was A. Matveeva's novel "Every Hundred Years", published in 2022 and included in the shortlist of the Big Book Award. A novel with a diary." The specificity of this work lies in the fact that the parallel developing life stories of the two heroines are presented in the form of their personal diaries, one of which is fictitious in nature, and the second is a real diary, which was kept throughout her life by A. Matveeva's grandmother, Ksenia Mikhailovna Levshina. In this regard, the question arises not only about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction literature, but also about what happens to the status of a personal diary belonging to the category of non-aesthetic texts when it is included in the context of a work of fiction, the solution of which became the purpose of this study. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the introduction to the theoretical basis of the study were the classical works of M. Riffater, J. Genette and V. Yser, devoted to the nature of fictionality, as well as general provisions concerning the signs of a fictional text, set out in the work of V. Schmid "Narratalogy". In the process of analyzing the novel, it was revealed that when fragments of the text of real diaries are placed in the context of a deliberately fictitious world, not only the relationship of the image of the character Xenichka to the real referent (K. M. Levshina) is lost, but also the text of her personal diaries lose their connection with factuality and acquire the status of an object of comprehension. The narrated event in the novel, therefore, is not only and not so much the life stories of the two characters, but also the interaction of the factual and fictional, intimate ego-document and novel, the very writing of any text, both artistic and documentary, and the understanding of life as an aesthetic object.