“Savely’s Days”: Novel-Estrangement and the Hero’s Path

Resumen

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the narrative of the novel by G. Sluzhitel, which has become a bright event in the cultural life of the country and a notable text of modern Russian-language literature. The “Savely’s Days” text has obvious features of the conceptualization of the events presented in it, which is due both to the artistic intent of the novel and to the narrator’s image (the cat Savely) chosen by the author for its implementation. The hypothesis of the present study can be defined as follows: the narrative line is determined and revealed to its readers through estrangement – an artistic technique and the universal law of art (according to V. Shklovsky). Being neither an author’s idiostyle nor an inherent feature of a particular literary genre, estrangement is a general property of text perception and is associated with the process of alienation at the moment of contemplation and description of the events presented in the text. In fiction, estrangement presupposes the mandatory deautomatization of meanings and the removal of the critical author from the narrative itself. Two main types of estrangement are presented in “Savely’s Days”: the private use of tropes (metaphors, euphemisms, etc.) and the compositional construction of the image associated with the author’s position and the text modus. Due to the connection between literary discourse and reality, estrangement serves to express the isomerism of the author’s worldview and becomes the linguistic means of its representation. The authors conclude that the image of the hero-narrator and the events of his life presented in the text correspond to the wanderings and metamorphoses of the classic hero (according to J. Campbell) described with the use of an estrangement technique. Posing information ambiguity, they determine the narrative pattern and provide the narrative intrigue of the novel.