THE “TEXT OF FATE” IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES OF WRITERS OF THE MODERN ERA (USING THE EXAMPLE OF A COLLECTION OF QUESTIONNAIRES BY F. FIEDLER'S “THE FIRST LITERARY STEPS: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN RUSSIAN WRITERS”)
Abstract
https://doi.org/10.18522/1995-0640-2025-2-113-123
The article provides the analysis of the narratives of professional writers in the collection of questionnaires by F. Fiedler's “The First Literary Steps: Autobiographies of Modern Russian Writers” (1911) from the point of view of universal ways of conceptualizing the writer's fate. Questionnaires (questionnaires) are a new genre for the modern era, used in publications of different status, where subjectivity was primarily appreciated. The author concludes that despite the difference in the position of writers in the artistic processes of the modern era, narratives of self-reflection tend to unify, placing the ontology “fate” and its possible roles in human life in the main position. The question frame of the questionnaire F. Fiedler focuses on a number of conventions adopted in society in relation to contemporary writers, as well as on social attitudes formed in previous eras, which consider it to be important to appeal to the direct speech of writers. The research of the autodocumentary texts of the modern era on the example of the genre of the questionnaire-autobiography of a writer turns out to be important for determining the universal models of egoization peculiar to writers of this time. The public self-reflection of the authors depends not only on the narrative framework proposed by F. Fiedler, but also tends to fictionalize in world construction and world representation, focusing on the scheme of an adventurous novel. Therefore, writers see the “fatality” of their life choices, describe their path to writing as trials, unexpected plot twists and the nonaccidental intervention of fate.
Key words: questionnaire of the writer, Russian modernism, ego narrative, media discourse, speech genres, Fedor Fiedler, literary autobiography, autobiographical practices, ontologeme “fate”, adventurous novel
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