Повесть В. Костерина «Снайп» как явление филологической прозы
The Short Novel (Povest’) of V. Kosterin “Snipe” as a Phenomenon of Philological Prose

Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes the short novel “Snipe” by V. Kosterin in the light of the peculiarities of philological prose, as well as the traditions of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Christian realism. First of all, the hero of the work himself, the sniper, the modern Raskolnikov (literally and figuratively) pays special attention to words, their sound and meaning. Locked up in a bunker for a long time, he repeatedly reads, rereads and even rewrites the novel Crime and Punishment, namely the chapter where Sonya reads the parable of the resurrection of Lazarus. From a passion for a literary text, through gaining a revelation about the Word, Roman Raskolnikov follows the path of spiritual awakening, repentance and transformation. The “philological nature” of the story is attributable to at least several factors: a subtle philological pattern of subtexts formed by epigraphs, onomapoetics, a system of intertextual echoes with Dostoevsky’s work, as well as the targeted attention of the author, a philologist, to the sacred function of the gospel word in a literary text and the use of his own theory of the icon nature of an artistic image. Contrasting with the emphatically historical, playful postmodernist orientation, as well as the total irony in regard to culture, V. Kosterin’s story steers the philological prose genre towards a moral-religious and timeless vector, which brings the genre to a new level and endows it with development prospects.

• Details
• Contents