Natalia Sorbatskya's novel literary slave: weekdays and feast days as metafiction

The article deals with the novel Literary Slave: Weekdays and Feast Days by a St. Petersburg writer Natalia Sokolovskaya (written under the pen name Natalia Sorbatskaya). This novel is used for examining the modern metafiction phenomenon and its place in the modern literary process. Literary Slave is metafiction of a special type - it includes the author's reflection on the modern publishing world, as well as the description of the literary cuisine and creativity mechanisms. The novel's title, its complex composition, and a plot built on the “literary Matryoshka principle” (a story within a story), enable us to define this work as a meta-novel, which intertwines love, autobiography and production novels and makes a diagnosis for the modern literary process.