The “internal emigration” as auto-reflexive literary discourse (on the basis of the works of Lydia Chukovskaya)

The article raises the question of ‘internal emigration’ as a literary discourse. The research is conducted on the basis of the ego-documents and fictional texts of Lydia Chukovskaya (“Going Under,” “The Dash,” “The Process of Exclusion,” dia 322 323 ries and memoirs). Methodologically, the article is based on narrative and discursive analysis, with the focus on the problem of the language of the totalitarian authority in the life-text and literary text. The author of the article refers to Hannah Arendt’s conception of totalitarian thinking and the methodological ideas of A.A. Zholkovsky, I. Paperno, L.Ya. Ginsburg. In the course of the component discourse analysis the following features are revealed: the “witness” status of the event and the poetics of the “witnesses’ testimonies”, the factography of the narrative, the narrative identity of the author and the narrator, the double narrative perspective, the dialogical point of view in relation to the implicit reader. It is shown that the auto-reflexive origin unites all components; auto-reflexivity is defined as the fundamental principle of Chukovskaya’s writing strategy and the key marker of her discourse. An analysis of the architectonics of the story “Going Under”, which opens the conflict between two inserted texts, leads the author to a final conclusion: based on the principle of autoreflexivity, Chukovskaya consistently developed her literary discourse as directed opposition to the “official” Soviet literature and totalitarian regime. Hence, in the final part of the article, the principle of auto-reflexivity is characterized as a representative marker of the literary work of “internal emigrants”, which in the future, according to the author, allows it to be considered as a typologically relevant feature for texts of “internal emigration” as a whole.