Literary cyclization in epic prose (on the problem of comparative analysis of the cycle and the novel as genre forms)

The article studies the relationship between the prose cycle and the novel. Looking at the development of the novel as a genre from a diachronic perspective, it is possible to see that between novels (Greek and antique, medieval and Rabelaisian, the Bildungsroman and the novel of formation, classical and modernist and postmodern novel) there is always a kind of intermediate ‘zone’ in which the process of preparing a new type of novel takes place. In literary studies, this ‘pre-novel’ genre form is called a prose cycle. However, in the studies of prose cyclization, there is still neither a theoretically developed approach to such literary phenomena nor unanimous opinion about their ontological connection with the novel genre. In our opinion, the theory of novel developed by M. M. Bakhtin, which deals with the fundamental features of the novel (folk culture of laughter, the incomplete present novel tense, marginal connection with reality, polyphony, multilingualism), may serve as the theoretical basis for the consideration of prose cycles. The relation between the cycle and the novel in this case is considered from the causal perspective as the relation of aprototext to the text or of a presupposition to the illocution. The paper considers contemporary literary studies on cyclization (by M. N. Darvin, V. I. Tyupa, A. S. Yanushkevich, and other researchers) in the context of the Bakhtin’s theory of novel on the basis of the assumption that there is an ontological connection between these two ‘illegal’ genre forms. In the process of analyzing these works, examined through the prism of Bakhtin's theory, one can see a gradual transformation of the cycle into the novel: from the cycles of the 1820s-30s, through Belkin's Tales, to the Russian classical novel. This opens the way to the interpretation of prose cycles taking into account the presence of the novel features in them.