N. S. LESKOV’S NOTEBOOK WITH EXTRACTS FROM “PROLOGUE” (THE EXPERIENCE OF TEXTUAL COMMENTS)

• Main Author: Inna N. Mineeva
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Petrozavodsk State University 2016-03-01
• Series: Problemy Istoričeskoj Poètiki
• Subjects: : Russian Literature of the 19th century; N. S. Leskov; A. S. Pushkin; L. N. Tolstoy; Pigault-Lebrun; J. Sher; medieval bookishness; Prologue; plot; notebook
• Online Access: http://poetica.pro/files/redaktor_pdf/1456395496.pdf

Thе article, for the fi rst time, provides a detailed textual commentary on N. S. Leskov’s notebook with extracts from “Prologue”. The extant literary materials include extracts and abstracts from the early printed Prologue, fi ction and historical literature of the 19th century, letters of European and Russian scholars and authors (Pushkin A., Tolstoy L., Pigault-Lebrun, Sher I.), devoted to  doctrine matters and religious aspects, description and analysis of anthropologic categories. The autograph is the evidence of spiritual search and creative experiments of  the writer. In  the books the  writer found endorsement of both his own ideas, and those ones that require further inner understanding, questioning and emotional upheaval. Meanwhile, studying the history, structure and contents of  Prologue in  the 1880s, Leskov found an  exceptional existential and creative experience. The most part of  the notebook shows the writer’s learning process of various examples of repentance, atonement, a sudden rebirth of a sinner, active love, the benefi ts of obedience, the miracle of movement of a saint in space, the phenomenon of manifestation of  supernatural power and its intervention in  life of  a  man (God, the Holy Spirit, Angels), etc. While working with Prologue texts Leskov enunciated some principles of  their artistic processing  (quoting “crisis”, “turning”, unusual fragments in  the Church Slavonic language, emphasizing key situations by changing the name, specifying the narration, acronyms, graphic intonation). General trends in  understanding of  the  Prologue source (ideological, imaginative, plot-compositional, stylistic), identifi ed in the notebook, are subsequently transformed by the author in a series of “Byzantine Legends” where they receive additional semantic and functional load.