The narrative intrigue in Z. Prilepin's novel “A black monkey”: the peculiarities of organization

The article is devoted to a research of the narrative structures of the text causing and maintaining readers’ interest. The main narrative intrigue of the text is enigmatic. The protagonist and the readers wonder the nature of “I”, the lost “self” and the mundane concepts of family, society, language. The importance of the plot of searching for the answer to this question leads to the devaluation of the importance of a detective plot and, respectively, an adventurous intrigue. As a result, the reader is involved not in tracing the characters’ adventures, but the motives - their development in accordance with the models of gradation, antithesis, and transformation into microplots. In this article the author investigates the complex organization of the motive level of text; the main semantic invariant becomes a decline, a downslope, a degradation. The semantics of decline forms the representation of space, the fate of the character, the intertextual level of the novel. The author opposes to these meanings the neomodernism concept of creativity as an escape from the terrible reality. The text about the totality of modern “decadence” reveals to be a special type of integrity, formed not by means of a plot, but by means of a skillfully organized correlation of the motives. The idea of decline brought to the reader by the contents of Prilepin’s novel is opposed by another poetical feature, that is dialoguicity. In the description of the investigation conducted by the protagonist the accent is not on his reflections or conclusions, but on dialogues with people around him: the opportunity to communicate is still possible for the protagonist, and this is a significant “anti-decadent” factor.