G.D. Grebenstchikoff's Late Autofiction: Narrative Strategies in the Story "Egorkina zhizn"

Abstract

As far as the genre of the last major work of G.D. Grebenstchikoff "Egorkina zhizn" is concerned, being an autobiographical material, it is a compromise of different trends – the aspiration to capture the world of the past as tangibly as possible, in all its details, and the need to establish literary communication with the reader. This challenged the author to use a number of narrative strategies – establishing an epic distance between the time and place of the events in the story, recurrent addressing the reader, and above all – various forms of socialization (generalization) of the personal, which is presented as an element of the self-contained and beautiful (seen from apart) harsh world of Siberian village, and – at the same time – as a way to shape a creative individual (the idea of vocation). The latter is manifested, in particular, in the abundance of literary parallels and comparisons, which form a conceptually significant overlap between literature and personal experience. On the one hand, Grebenstchikoff's experience in autobiographical genre contributes to the wealth of autobiographical prose of the XIX century, on the other hand, it is natural for such genre of modern literature as autofiction, the extreme popularity of which is associated both with the desire to abandon dated narrative strategies, and the ambition to re-examine the category of fiction.