In the mirror labyrinth of literary narrative. Book review: Molnar A. Reception and analysis of the text: selected works. Moscow: Azbukovnik Publ., 2023. 447 p

The book by Angelika Mo1h6i, contemporary Hungarian researcher, is devoted to the study of Russian literature from its classical origins to the present day. The author turns to Бrpбd Kov6cs’ discursive poetics. According to the scholar, a literary work should be considered not only and not so much at the level of the narrated story, but also in terms of its textual features: the act of writing, the “poetic organization of discourse”, and the “presentation of narration” should be at the center of the researcher’s attention. It is this tactic that Molnбr adheres to, undertaking a detailed analysis of the works of the 19th-21th centuries (A.S. Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, M.Yu. Lermontov’s “The Hero of Our Time”, I.S. Turgenev’s “The Diary of a Superfluous Man”, L.N. Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, A.P. Chekhov’s “Sleepy”, E.I. Zamyatin’s “The Dragon”, Ven. V. Erofeev’s “Notes of a Psychopath”, A.B. Titov’s “Little Tales of War and Peace” and many others). Molnбr’s conceptual “matrix” is summarized in several key points: the story in a literary work is a figurative reinterpretation of the very process of artistic writing; the narrative in the fictional world can be a logical continuation of the narrated events; nothing in the narrative arises without any reason, even if the appearance of certain details does not lend itself to a plot in pretation, which means that one of the most important tasks of a literary researcher is to identify non-obvious correlations in the text, supplementing or even fundamentally changing its primary understanding; the true meaning of the narrative is revealed through intertextual connections that are not perceptible in the plane of the narrated events, but are noticeable at the level of discourse. The book under review is characterized by its conceptual and compositional completeness, attention to little-studied phenomena of contemporary Russian prose, and the accuracy of the analysis made in the tradition of “close reading”. The author also offers a very valuable review of the researches of Hungarian specialists in Russian literature. Molnбr’s book is an interesting and in-depth study that combines historical and theoretical approaches to the material under consideration and can be useful for specialists of different profiles.