Non-narrative in the Russian emigre prose as manifestation of the rule of literary development

The narrative element was weakened in the prose of the First Wave of Russian emigration. It is especially noticeable in comparison with the literature of the metropolis of the same period, which distinctly gravitated towards the epic in the 1920s. In the emigrant prose of the first post-revolutionary years, journalism dominated, and after the mid-1920s it was replaced by memoir compositions. In terms of its textual organization, this prose was heterogeneous. We can describe two components in it: “memories”, mostly narrative, and “reflections”, which are based on the text-mentative with its reference not to chronotope, but to thinking. In practice, these text forms often co-existed as part of a single work. Yet the intensity of using mentative, with its specific text formation strategies, is generally characteristic of the emigrant prose of the first wave. It is an organizing principle in G. Adamovich’s “Comments”, in M. Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Bryusov, and is actively used in the works of other emigrant writers. The appeal to the text-mentative was a manifestation of the regularity of the Russian literature development at the stage of convergence of artistic and non-artistic words, which occurred in the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries. The textual form of mentative conveys the movement of thought as such, and this property made it irrelevant in the authoritarian culture of the Soviet state. Typologically similar to emigrants works, such as “The Safe Conduct” by B. Pasternak, faced pressure from censorship and were subject to distortions when published. In the emigrant literature, free from ideological pressure, text-mentative remained in demand, first, as an organic form of reasoning, and second, as an actual text form in literary development. The weakening of narration was accompanied by the spread of mentative. Thus, in emigration, the evolutionary regularity of the literary process was carried out in its natural way.