On some boundaries of literary criticism and philology (short stories and feuilletons by M. Zoshchenko in the reception of critics and researches of the 1920-es)

Literature, criticism and philology in Russia in the 1900s - 1910s presented unprecedentedly dense collaboration of writers, critics and philologists, when one person in many cases could play all or most these roles. For the 1920s, the growing autonomy of criticism from philology, was quite a characteristic process, which, among other factors (such as practice of literary critics who lacked serious research background), destroyed general methodological premises of literary journalism. Meanwhile, already in the beginning of the 1920’s it was declared a line in Zoshchenko’s works, which was determined by researchers of that time as central in his literary career and generally in the satirical literature of the age, and as innovative in relation to prose of the 19th century. The paper analyzes early stories of Zoshchenko, written by him in the manner of the so-called “skaz”. The writer’s satirical journalism is demonstrated here as well. Satirical skaz was a real creative achievement of Zoshchenko, despite the fact that in the 1920s he wasn’t alone in using this device. In the literary journalism of the 1920s when evaluating of Zoshchenko’s small prose conflict positions were grounded. The idea of denying satire in post-revolutionary conditions, a lack of understanding of “skaz” nature, and, in particular, of the satirical skaz, a vulgar idea of both the nature of creativity and laws of constructing a work of art - all these were the sources of the methodological biases of the mass criticism of the 1920s. At the same time the philologists even offered deep concepts about Zoshchenko’s small prose. The distrust of criticism towards this principle of narration, the expectation and the insistent demand for an open, declared attitude of the author to the picture and plot gave rise to reflections not only about the advantages of skaz and its limits, but also, to a greater extent, the author’s myopic mind, his identity to his heroes, the parochialism of his artistic vision. This is how the evaluations of Zoschenko’s prose in mass criticism were different with the way Yu. Tynyanov and V. Vinogradov, the writer’s contemporaries philologists just punished there excellent and now world-recognized theoretical works, interpreted and analyzed the skaz forms. In the paper these collisions are analyzed on the basis of M. Zoshchenko’s literary works and their understanding in mass criticism, linguistic analysis, and literary criticism.