HERO-WRITER IN V. P. ASTAFYEV'S NOVEL «THE SAD DETECTIVE»

Abstract

The article examines the image of the writer-hero Leonid Soshnin, the protagonist of V. P. Astafyev's novel "The Sad Detective", published in 1986. Leonid Soshnin's movement towards his dream of becoming a writer is analyzed from different angles. The hero's self-assessment and his idea of ​​the typical path of a writer indicate his distrust of himself and his real creative abilities, which makes his image akin to the images of little people in 19th-century Russian literature. The hero's search for answers to questions that are important in the context of his chosen creative path, primarily about the mystery of the Russian soul, about good and evil, about ways to fight evil, is carried out at the beginning and end of the novel's action in different ways: from a poorly organized replenishment of reading and writing experience to the experience of contact with folk life and folk wisdom. The hero moves from replacing family and close relationships with reading and writing, from a lonely existence in a cruel and merciless world full of evil to a harmonious combination of the role of husband and father with dreams of creative self-realization. The abundance of intertextual inclusions in the novel (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Tolstoy, etc. are mentioned in varying volumes), on the one hand, provides grounds for discussing the literary hero's reading preferences and the prerequisites for the formation of his writing strategy, on the other hand, it allows us to judge the hero's complex movement towards accepting family as the main value in life and the main creative impulse.