Aesopian Language in Russian Literature /Modern Period/. (Russian Text).

Abstract

From its very beginning Russian literature developed under thewatchful eye of ideological censorship. The interrelation between literature and government censorship has been the subject of various investigations. Some studies have explored the history of censorship in Russia as a state institution; others discuss the strategies explored by literary magazines and individual writers to circumvent censorial barriers. Interpretation and virtual decoding of literary works remain the general preoccupationof Russian literary scholars, for this literature abounds with circumlocutions, allusions, allegories, irony and even systems of codes.All the abovelisted devices taken together are usually termed as "Aesopian Language" (a term presumably coined by M. E. Saltykov-Scedrin in(' )1860's). An apparently related topic, which is investigated to a much lesser degree is the aesthetic aspect of the interrelations within the triangle Author-Censor-Reader. In this work the author attempts to describe Aesopian language as a special aesthetic system. Chapter I describes the history of this problem in Russian literary scholarship. Chapter II provides the semantic and structural analyses of typical Aesopian texts and discusses Aesopian writing, censorship and readers' receptiveness to hidden messages in the light of information theory. These analyses reveal the uniform underlying structure of any Aesopian text. Two basic elements of this structure are "screens," which are designed to conceal the real message from the censorship, and "markers," which signal initiated readers about the presence of a hidden message in the text. Russian literature at any given period of its existence has developed sophisticated systems of screens and markers, or Aesopian metastyles (the term "metastyle" is used because Aesopian language operates upon stylistic elements of literary works and is, therefore, another structure imposed upon the stylistic structure of a text). Chapter III examines the typology of Aesopian devices exploited by modern Russian literature, reviews the favorite Aesopian genres of Russian writers, and , on the basis of numerous examples, describes the poetics of Aesopian language. Chapters IV, V and VI demonstrate how Aesopian language affectsthe creativity of individual writers and the overall literary process. Theyare dedicated, respectively, to the works of Evgenij Svarc, Evgenij(' )Evtusenko and Soviet writers of children's literature. These chaptersdiscuss the strategies of Aesopian writers. In particular, they examinethe importance of ambiguity and redundancy for creating effective Aesopian writing. Chapter VII (Conclusion) deals with the psychological aspect of communication between an Aesopian writer and his reader. It suggests that in art the content of Aesopian message is irrelevant, that the purpose of Aesopian writing and "Aesopian reading" is to perform a sort of ritual that celebrates the deception of authority.