“Event of reading” in the T. Tolstaya’s novel “Kys”

The article presents the interpretation of the reading event in T. Tolstaya’s novel “Kys”. T. Tolstaya includes “real” readers in her system of characters, who interact with the texts of literary and folk works in different ways, embodying in their individual reading event different receptive trajectories described by receptive aesthetics and structuralism in the 20th century. The representation in the novel by T. Tolstya of the reading event leading to the formation of a “naive-realistic” and “ideal” readers (Benedict and Varvara Lukinishna), as well as the reading event leading to the emergence of a post-structuralism and postmodernism “scriptor” (Fyodor Kuzmich) is studied. T. Tolstaya in the novel “Kys” shows that the formation of the protagonist of the novel, Benedict, occurs through the event of reading; his way of participating in aesthetic communication determines his personal outlook and ethical values. Benedict is portrayed as a reader who has access only to naive-realistic and consumer reading, associated with the category of “reading pleasure” (R. Barth); in the author’s outlook, such reading is marked as “murder of the book”. Later, Benedict comes to understand the leading role of the reader, arguing that the act of reading the works of the author by the reader is necessary for the existence of the text in reality. The formation of the “ideal reader”, which occurs only in the process of “dialogical”, thoughtful and attentive to the logic of the text itself, is shown through the type of reading practiced by Varvara Lukinishna. T. Tolstaya creates an unusual compositional structure, naming the chapters of the novel according to the letters of the alphabet, and engages real readers of her novel in a postmodern discussion game about the essence of reading as an ethical and aesthetic event, giving readers a chance to read the “book of life” that Benedict could not read. The article presents an analysis of the structure of the narrative plot in T. Tolstya’s novel “Kys” based on the concept of “Reading Event”. The analysis showed that Tolstaya uses the diegetic “reading event” in different versions to form an unusual kind of dystopia, which puts certain ways of reading as the basis of the social model exposed by the author and studies the consequences of their sociocultural influence. The category “reading event” is considered in the article also in the traditions of Phenomenological Hermeneutics as a “dialogue”, as an aesthetic coexistence of the author and the reader in the act of reading. In T. Tolstya’s novel there is a game with the reader of this text by embedding intertextual references to the receptive concepts of the 20th century, focused on the interpretation of the category of the Reader as an aesthetic subject and his role in the reading process, into the system of characters. The meaning of the anti-utopian plot in the novel “Kys” is thus specified: the social or cultural model denied by the author is based here on the “tradition of reading” brought to the grotesque, which in itself does not provide a “culture of reading”. The “author-scriptor” (from structuralism) and the reader, who is the “assembly point” of all possible interpretations, the “hedonist” reader, declared by the “phenomenology of the body”, taken to the extreme in personification, reveal their value limitations, which reduce the complex phenomenon of the aesthetic dialogical event of reading to a simple act of one-sided reader’s action. Thus, the Event of Reading, presented in many depicted acts, forms a postmodern version of dystopia directed against the pressure of cultural models on human consciousness in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.