THE PLAY NARRATION MODE IN ANDREI BELY’S “MASKS”

Alexejeva Nadezhda Vasiljevna, Doctor of philological sciences, professor, sub-department of literature, Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University named after I. N. Ulyanov (4 100-letiya V. I. Lenina square, Ulyanovsk, Russia), alexejeva31@mail.ru

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10.21685/2072-3024-2016-2-12

Background. The problem statement is explained by the fact that the problem of the play origin has not been yet studied in the literary theory or the literary analysis praxis, as well as by the demand for enhancement of the tools relevant to the play nature of the written word. The research objective is to reveal the ways of the play narration mode implementation in the “Masks” novel.
Materials and methods. The research subject is the contextual and event-related layer of “Masks” associated with the “Mandro plot” – one of the key characters in the novel. The literary text is analyzed through historic-and-literary, problem-and-typological, structural-and-semiotic analyses. The plot is structured by the contrast of the tragic/comic, and is enacted as a phantasmagoric two-act performance.
The author appears as a stage-manager, a play writer, and a set designer. The pre-dominance of a theatricalized style reveals in the succession of the masks, situations, acting areas, the speech arrangement of the dialogues, the “stage” space, and the stage directions. The game and the reality are “shifted”, displaced.
Results. The analytical principle of “slow reading” makes it possible to observe how the logics of the movement, the flow of the author’s thought manifest them-selves through “extrinsicality”. The seriocomic approaches of the masquerade poet-ics, the vulgar genres of the folk culture reflect the shape of the inverse world, and replicate the author’s impression of the Russian existence on the eve of the disast-rous destruction of the epochs. The artistic reality of “Masks” is tailored for a “rea-ding spectator” apperception.
Conclusions. The research makes it clear that the play mode of “Masks” novel structuring is a new form of building a new world model within the aesthetic system of Andrei Bely. The further study of the play narration mode in literature will pro-vide means for determining and defining general-theoretical and cultural approaches to the game nature of art, and will enrich the idea of the first third ХХ century “new Russian prose” poetics.

play opening, play mode, mask, genre poetics, masquerade, knock about comedy, farce, clownary.

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