Article

Name: THE STRUCTURE OF A PLOT OF THE M. A. NIKITIN’S BOOK “THE WAY TO THE NORTH”

Authors: V. N. Yarantsev

Independent researcher, Novosibirsk

In the section Russian Literature of Siberia: Plots, Motives, Biographies

Abstract: Article investigates the modifications of a plot in the early Soviet literature of the end of the 1920th which have resulted from updating of a genre of a sketch in literary and public life of the Soviet Union. This tendency can be seen already in works of the middle of the 1920s in I. Babel’s “Cavalry” created on the basis of diaries in D. Furmanov’s “Chapayev” where symptoms of a hybrid of art and documentary literature are especially noticeable. M. Nikitin was influenced by Omsk writer Anton Sorokin, who experimented in his works on the verge of a literary scandal, where the differences between the literary character and the biographical author were erased. In M. Nikitin’s creativity of the end of the 1920s such hybridization and mediation is observed in the book “Way on the North” (1929). Her main plot of the travelogue, water expedition to the Turukhansk region of scientists, business executives, journalists, cinematographers accompany numerous retreats: plug-in short stories, scenes and episodes, literary hints and portraits of characters, etc., with a notable retrospective bias and a tendency to formation of a parallel plot by the principle of contrast, a counterpoint. The analysis of the text reveals additional, in comparison with I. Babel and A. Sorokin’s influence, a source of influence on the book by M. Nikitin – the theoretical researches in the field of V. Shklovsky’s plot evolving by the end of the 1920s to the indisputable importance of “vneesteticheskiy faktor” for art prose in doctrine parameters of “fact literature”. Also the dependence or direct coincidence to the statements of the theorist of LEF N. Chuzhak is noticeable. In literary practice of M. Nikitin mastering in the book “Way on the North” “extra esthetic” material of the Siberian expedition within a sketch, the plot of the travelogue and a “additional” plot of literary flashbacks and hints are in the attraction pushing away relations. They can be considered at the same time and in “vertical” of a counterpoint, conditional “counterplot”, and in “horizontal” of the hybridism predetermined by a multidimensional role of the author – the writer-researcher and also the screenwriter of the estimated film which is shot during the expedition. What was treated modern to M. Nikitin by criticism as an impressionism rudiment an art delicacy, “lyrics”, was a necessary component for the general sense of the book, her pathos – the aspiration to reflect variety of the natural and vital phenomena of Siberia in all range of literary means and discourses, formal and substantial.

Keywords: plot, essay, traveloh, the fact is, babel, shklovsky, siberia

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