Authorial notes to the text: an artistic device or an ego-document?

Abstract

Based on the authorial notes to the “Letters of a Russian Traveler” by N. Karamzin, who separated “poetry” from “truth”, the article considers the following questions: how to determine the aesthetic nature of the notes; how they are connected with the change of literary trends, genres and styles, with the communicative function of verbal art, how the artistry of notes is formed; whether they are an integral part of the work; whether the author of the notes and the author of the main text are identical. We emphasize that Karamzin’s notes should be analyzed, first of all, in terms of his attitude to the problem of “literature and reality”, since for him authenticity was more important than artistry. The writer enters not into an artistically mediated, but into a direct dialogue with the reader, in order to gain his understanding and trust, to convince him of the veracity of what is described, while revealing a new level of understanding of what happened earlier. The article investigates the dynamics of the relationship between the notes and the main text. The special arrangement of the notes, the temporal and spatial distance separating them from the main text is interpreted as the evidence of their heterogeneity. We note the differences in their status: the main text, in principle, can exist and be perceived by the reader without the notes, albeit in a flawed form, while the publication of the notes in isolation from the main text is meaningless. The article highlights that it is in the literature of sentimentalism and, in particular, in Karamzin’s works, that a specific artistic quality of notes is developed in the form of a dialogue with an imaginary reader. The conclusion is made about the referential function of the authorial notes: in the “Letters of a Russian Traveler” they link literature and reality, the world of images and the real world, which is characterized by “its selective affinity” with the world of fiction.