Genre peculiarities of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”

The article is devoted to the genre study of B. Pasternak's novel “Doctor Zhivago”. The novel is viewed as a genre polyform whose elements are genetically connected with the most significant stages of literary development (myth, folklore, and literature). Regularities of the interaction of various genre vectors that form the novel are revealed. One of the significant regularities is actualization of both maximum and minimum (including zero) degrees of manifestation of textual characteristics. Thus “Doctor Zhivago” combines features of the philological metanovel, narrative imitating oral narration, pre- and off-genre speech flow and “text as such” that respectively has zero autoreflexivity. The second regularity: the writer's work with literary genre models can be described as a reserse movement toward the novel “sources” that presupposes inversion of the genre dominants through referring to which this way is realized. Pasternak creates a peculiar kind of “epilogue” to the Russian classical novel of the 19 th century transforming invariants of the adventure, family and biographical, ideological, trial and development novels. Within the framework of interacting with the latter, the writer's refusal from the seemingly greatest achievement of the realistic literature, the art of simultaneous depicting of the changing world and changing hero is interesting. Pasternak's “ready-made”, “completed” hero tries to lose his synchronism with the surrounding circumstances. Besides classical literature, “Doctor Zhivago” comes into contact with the genre modifications of the modernist and contemporary novels. One may speak about Pasternak's, in this situation, genre “protheism”, by analogy with Pushkin's “protheism”. Echoing a significant row of genre paradigms, “Doctor Zhivago” does not correspond to anyone in particular, and this probably indicates the new type of artistic unity forming within its framework that is named nowadays “total novel”.