Understanding the fate of literary anecdotes in contemporary philology

This article deals with the study of anecdotal forms in modern literary criticism. In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the study of the semantics, pragmatics and poetics of the anecdote. It focuses on the books of the Slavist E. Ia. Kurganov, The Russian Munchausen (2017) and The Absurd in Russian Literature: The Historical Anecdote in Writers’ Texts (2020). The first book is mainly concerned with anecdotal forms of oral communication in Russian culture of the nineteenth century, while the second book traces the influence of anecdotal models on the construction of literary works by A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, V. F. Odoevsky, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky, N. S. Leskov, A. P. Platonov, and S.D. Dovlatov. The current article discusses the connections of Kurganov’s works with the Russian scholarly tradition of studying the anecdote. It stresses the productivity of Kurganov’s view of the fluidity and historiosophical nature of the anecdote.