The synthesis of fiction and non-fiction in the literary and critical treatise “Reflections on the Difference between Highflown, Grandiloquent, Stately, Loud and Pompous Styles” by M. Muravyov

The paper examines the methods of synthesizing non-fictional and fictional content in the literary and critical treatise “Reflections on the Difference between Highflown, Grandiloquent, Stately, Loud and Pompous Styles” by M. Muravyov, one of the leading Russian figures of literary culture in the second half of the 18^th–early 19^th centuries. The research is conducted in the context of the problem concerning the artistic understanding of the role of style, style in aesthetics, moral philosophy and rhetoric. To provide a complete review, we use data on the aesthetic views of M. Muravyov, revealing the relation of the formal organization of the text to its content, the role of the documentary genre features and literary and artistic techniques. The article determines the innovative vector of the author’s thought in solving the classical theory of three styles. We investigate the ways the individual author’s style influences the language of the critical treatise and the complex of his artistic and expressive means. The attitude to the style and its power gradually reveals M. Muravyov’s poetics in his deeply personal perception of art as a way of comprehending the artist’s soul. In the treatise under study, the word is presented as a central object of thought, as well as a tool for declaring an individual author’s attitude to the problem of the highflown style function in literature. Against the background of the broad context of the historical and literary process, we analyze the role of the writer’s personality, located on the periphery of two time periods, at the junction of two trends, documentary and fictional. M. Muravyov, the author of the treatise, actualizes the problem of the synthesis of documentary and fictional principles through the selection of material, the selection of key texts by ancient authors and their representation in the system of new artistic tasks of Russian literature. The study of the literary-critical treatise through the biographical, structural-typological, historical-typological methods and the methods of complex analysis serves as an additional basis for confirming the key theoretical provisions of our work.

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