The aim of the project is to create a typology and poetics of the Russian novel in a wider European and world context. The author takes into account hitherto invented conceptions of the novel, but his own conception is based on the so-called pre-post paradox of Russian literature which developed as an imitation of foreign evolutionary paradigms and domestic autochthonous roots; the imitation was not, however, perfect, was not completed, remained unfinished (pre), so it may have been regarded as a sort of innovation (post). In the not fully secularised Russian culture the novel was understood as an unwanted child who must be born. In the series of evolutionary impacts the Russian novel had a peculiar form, its own ways of development, its own genesis, atrange poetics and specific relatioins to other genre strata. The project is based on a new reading of the crucual works of Russian literature incliding the beginnings of the novel structures in the Middle Ages.

Publications