The short novel (povest’) of V. Kosterin “Snipe” as a phenomenon of philological prose

The article analyzes the story of V. Kosterin "Snipe" in the light of the peculiarities of philological prose, as well as the traditions of Christian realism by F. M. Dostoevsky. First of all, the hero of the work himself, the sniper, the modern Raskolnikov (literally and figuratively) pays special attention to words, their sound and meaning. Being locked up in a bunker for a long time, he repeatedly reads, rereads and even rewrites the novel Crime and Punishment, namely the chapter of reading the parable of the resurrection of Lazarus. From a passion for a literary text, through gaining a revelation about the Word, Roman Raskolnikov is on the path of spiritual awakening, repentance and transformation. The “philological nature” of the story is due to at least several factors: a subtle philological pattern of subtexts formed by epigraphs, onomapoetics, a system of intertextual echoes with Dostoevsky’s work, as well as the targeted attention of the author, a philologist, to the sacred function of the gospel word in a literary text and the use of his own theory of iconicity artistic image. Contrasting with the emphatically historical, playful postmodernist orientation, as well as the total irony over culture, V. Kosterin's story brings the genre of philological prose to a moral-religious and timeless vector, which provides the genre with a new level and development prospects.