‘The Tsar Fish’ by Viktor Astafyev: Publicism as a Genre Format

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the key works written by V. P. Astafyev, one of the greatest Russian novelist and publicist of the second half of the 20th century. The study aims to identify the genre nature of the work, which the writer himself defined as ‘narration in stories’. The analytical algorithm is based on methods developed in line with the theory of publicistic writing. From the authors’ point of view, the genre definition itself shows the orientation toward the use of a publicistic genre format, which assumes not only a certain sequence of the content components characterized by extreme relevance, and no less a certain language used, but also a clear dominance of the author-narrator in the character system. The main conclusion is that the presence of the author in the Astafyev’s text, provoking the perception of The Tsar Fish as a literary-and-publicistic work, is due to the extreme relevance of the presented real-life material, a deep apprehension of which did not yet occur at the time of the creation of the text. The use of multi-genre publicistic text components as a manifestation of the narrator's activity is due to the initial stage of reflection upon the presented material. Publicistically, there is provided a focus and orientation for further reflection on the stated topics and problems, which is quite understandable for the period of changing epochs. In essence, the publicistic format (method and form) of presenting material related to real life in this case becomes a manifestation of literary writing canons that presuppose a certain logic, method, and stage-by-stage reflection upon current topics and problems.