Game with the Reader as a Means of Implementing the Historical and Literary Concept of A. S. Pushkin (On the Problem “Pushkin and Rococo”)

Aim. To analyze the specifics of organizing a creative dialogue with the reader in the structure of A. S. Pushkin’s unfinished prose in the aspect of genetic connections with the traditions of the rococo novel, to establish structural units of Pushkin’s text associated with the rocaille novel, to reveal the features of expressing the author’s view of literature as a living, developing system that requires special erudition and responsiveness from the reader.

Methodology. The analysis proposed in the article is based on the principles of historical-genetic and comparative-typological analysis of a literary work. Characterization of the main elements of the text, comparable to the Rococo novel as a literary, polemical and metatextual phenomenon, is carried out using elements of the structural-semiotic method, as well as elements of cultural semiotics.

Results. The analysis undertaken made it possible to identify literary motifs in Pushkin’s unfinished works – “Arap of Peter the Great”, “Novel in Letters”, “Roslavlev”, as well as to consider the significance for the design of Pushkin’s historical and literary concept, to identify the features of its substantive and formal aspects, to establish genetic sources of the similar “games with the reader” associated with the rocaille traditions of Western Europe, as well as the work of N. M. Karamzin, primarily with his book “Letters of a Russian Traveller”.

Research implications. The results of the study can be the basis for considering the historical and literary concept of Pushkin as a whole, as well as studying the concept of literary play, the motive of the hero-reader in a literary work, as well as the deep processes of transformation occurring in the novel at the turn of the 18^th – 19^th centuries.

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