Synthesis of documentary and fictional principles in Russian Enlightenment Realism

Enlightenment Realism is one of the most important phenomena in national culture of the second half of the18^th and the beginning of the 19^th centuries. By its inward nature, this school belongs to the so-called “reconstructing type of creative writing” (according to the conception of N. A. Gulyaev, one of the authors of the genesis and evolution holistic conception of early realism synthesis trends with the Enlightenment philosophy). It was this modifier that essentially stimulated priority attention to a specific sort of documentalism entering into a specific relationship with the laws of fictional value in ideology of Russian Enlightenment Realism. Taking as a vivid example the creative writing of such leading representatives of this school as D. I. Fonvizin, A. N. Radishchev, I. A. Krylov, M. V. Milonov, we can trace clearly enough several variants-models of documentary and literary principles. The literary scope of our analysis can be classified into three key ideological and thematic groups: a) a document, included in the literary work, preserves its relatively self-sufficient being in any context. This fact results in characteristic dialectical contradiction with the principles of fictional value and becomes an additional method in the writer’s laboratory. This tendency is observed in the literary works of A. N. Radishchev and I. A. Krylov; b) a document, finding itself in a new fictional environment, intertwines, interacts with it, thus creation of new quality is stimulated either in a relatively neutral key of interpretation-elucidation or with already welldefined parodic aims. Illustrations in the literary works of D. I. Fonvizin and A. N. Radishchev demonstrate this fact; c) the fictional world “is transferred” according to the author’s will to a rigid documentary aura and “mixes” with it. As a rule, either “disillusionment”, disclosure of literature as the world of fantasy (in I. A. Krylov’s “Oriental Tale”) or advancement of the program of requirements on “adjusting” literary pathos to documentary contemporary context (in M. V. Milonov’s satires) are possible in this case.

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