Modes of perspectivation: on the categorical framework of diachronic narratology (on the material of the Russian literature)

Point of view (PoV) as a category has been studied achronically until now. The diachronic approach could only be applied locally or is subject to an ideological message (Weimann, Lancer) that does not allow us to focus on the PoV issue as such. The article attempts to fill in this gap. The relationship between two basic narrative perspectives, narratorial PoV and figural PoV (W. Schmid), is unstable, dynamic, and generates historically productive modes of perspectivation: a monofocal mode -events are depicted solely from the narrator’s PoV (Old Russian literature and literature of the eighteenth century); a variofocal mode, - the personal PoV is optional (early classics); a bifocal mode based on the mandatory combination of two perspectives within a single text (late classics); a transfocal mode, associated with the transformation of the narrative “lenses” themselves: the narratorial PoV is no longer the warrant of events, “dispersing” the plot foundation of the work, and the figural PoV is the only “identifier” of the story (Chekhov’s prose); metafocal mode, where a differentiation of narratorial and figural PoV, so natural for the narrative practices of the nineteenth century, is questioned (ornamental prose, Platonov’s and Sholokhov’s works, literature of postmodernism). Modes of perspectivation do not replace each other once and for all. Once they have emerged, they are reproduced on and on, resulting in different ralations of narratorial and figural perspectives at the same historical stage.