Research Article Open Access

The Problem of Folklorism in Russian Prose of Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Russian literature at the beginning of the twentieth century deals with cardinal worldview shift towards the loss of infernality, coherence of poetical view, appearance of trend towards strengthening foundations associated with form and creativeness. Henceforth, the prose was searching for experiments directly with the form of the piece: from the speech level to the reconstruction of genre model, originating in folklore tradition. Analysis of symbolist prose by Andrey Bely and realistic stories of V. Korolenko reveals latent or obvious folkloristic layer, manifesting itself in synthesizing both fairytale structure on the whole, and the elements of mythological narrative, dating back to deep mythological semantics. The brightest forms of folklorism transformation involve the stylization and imitation of mythological narrative, brightly reflected in the stories by Andrey Bely and V. Korolenko written between 1900 and 1905. In his Siberian literary works V. Korolenko focuses on the folklore imitation of the other’s oral tradition (the Yakut epos olonkho) alongside with folklore stylization of modernist proseby. Imitation of the Yakut folklore adds to Korolenko's stories true artistic presentation of Siberian everyday life, people and nature. Diverse variations of folklorism in the plane of mythological foundations enable us to make a conclusion about strengthening form-creative trends in the prose of the early twentieth century, about the search for different rhythmization means, expansion of semantic field of mythological associations, allusions, the use of wide range of stylization methods, not limited by the speech level, and fairy-tale plot components, myth in structuring narrative text

Oshchepkova AI, Ivanova OI

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