"What does it mean to be yourself?": writer and publicist Yu.N. Govoruho-Otrok

The aim of the study is to analyze the «artistic and publicistic unity» based on the aggregate of works by Yu. Govorukho-Otrok, comprehending the views of Vl. Solovyov. Based on the study of the essay «Mister Antichrist» and a series of 26 articles published in the newspaper «Moskovskie vedomosti», their unity with the autonomous model of the fictional world, with the images of the author and the addressee, and with the system of characters, as well as with the general conflict is established. The main content of the research is the study of such aspects of cyclization as: a plot, or a critical situation, the interaction of fiction and documentary, forms of the author’s presence, the nature of dialogization, methods of constructing the addressee’s image. This work shows that fictional and critical prose, united by the image of the author, plot and system of leitmotifs, makes it possible to see in Govorukho-Otrok not only a bright journalist and publicist of his time, but also an independent writer. On the investigated topic of the relationship between the artistic and the journalistic, the author considers new material from the corpus of the author’s literary-critical texts. The essay «Mister Antichrist», in particular, and a cycle of works comprehending the aesthetic and philosophic views of Vl. Solovyov, in general, are an example of how the virtually unknown texts, some of them being extracted from pre-revolutionary periodicals, gradually reveal their formal and substantial unity. The practical significance of the article is obvious due to the possibility of using its results in works on the theory and methodology of the analysis of a literary critical text. The texts of Govorukho-Otrok, previously not used for analysis, reveal syncretism at the level of journalistic and artistic components.