RussianSubtext and intertext in P. Vail’s essay “A writer for readers”
Liberal Arts in Russia. 2022. Vol. 11. No. 2. Pp. 103-112.
Get the full text (Russian) Email: kealis@gmail.com Abstract
The article offers an analysis of the essayistics of one of the popular representatives of the “third wave” of Russian emigration, Pyotr Vail, who created a number of literary essays devoted to the work and personality of A. Terts, I. Brodsky, S. Dovlatov, etc. The authors of the paper show that the intertextual connections of Weil’s essay form the subtext layers of his journalism and generate paradoxical perspectives of the perception of the text. The authors trace how the Weil critic carries out, it seems, an objective analysis of the writer’s work, but with an invariable degree of subjectivity demonstrates the duality of assessments, the axiological instability of the depicted. The critic plays with the reader, veiling the true assessment of the hero-writer, by means of intertext immersing antinomic axiology into the subtext. The analysis carried out in the article shows that the author-essayist remained an objective observer at the external level, but at the deep level of the text skillfully concealed his true judgment about the hero-artist. Indeed, it is precisely these features - the author’s presence and subjective personality - that, in our opinion, become signs of Vail’s special style, that is, they deserve to outline the purpose of this study - to take a closer look at the nature of the linguistic realities to which the essayist refers. Playing with the lexical, syntactic, stylistic possibilities of the Russian word allows the author to “expose” masterfully the talent of a modern prose writer, outwardly (at the speech level) remaining flawlessly objective, it seems, reproducing very accurately the features of the writer’s manner.
Keywords
- • P. Vail
- • essays
- • subtext strategies
- • axiology
- • tendency
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