Speech strategies of oral utterances as a way of fictionalizing a document in the biographical prose of Zakhar Prilepin

Abstract

The article analyzes speech strategies of oral utterances used in Zakhar Prilepin’s biographical novel “Yesenin: Promising a Meeting Ahead” as a tool for fictionalizing documentary sources, which occurs not only at the junction of journalistic and fictional discourse, but also on the boundary of interpenetration of oral and written utterances.

The article notes various ways of including a document in the fictional space: direct citation, history or retelling, evaluative interpretation and hidden polemics. We analyze the rhetorical strategies, used by the author for the artistic organization of individual macro-themes of the work, as well as the forms of dialogization characteristic of oral discourse. We identify lexical and syntactic means of colloquial speech, which, when introduced into the book text, make the manner of presentation more expressive, while the images of the author and narrator are brought closer together, reducing the distance between the author and the reader.

In addition, the use of rhetorical patterns for constructing an argumentative statement allows Z. Prilepin to include documentary evidence of the era in the narrative, which maintains dynamism through the construction of a polemical context.

The writer’s experience of oral presentations in the media environment helps him to organize the text based on the features of lively, natural speech with an open expression of the author’s position, it is aimed at a mass audience and an interested reader – his interlocutor.