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Abstract:

The article attempts to comprehend some properties of D.S. Merezhkovsky’s “antinomic poetics” in his historical fiction. These traits also explain the artistic purpose of stylization in the third part of Merezhkovsky’s novel “Antichrist. Peter and Alexis”: the historical sources consulted by the author did not contain the antinomies that would symbolize profound contradictions between Peter and Aleksei. The genre model of a diary belonging to two different people, a foreigner as an outside observer and Tsarevich Alexei being in an acute conflict with Peter, enabled Merezhkovsky to implement those “positions for viewing life” (M.M. Bakhtin) that he lacked in historical sources. The analysis indicates that Merezhkovsky developed variations of two types of ego-documents, acted as the viewpoint of the prototype texts’ authors, employed characteristic speech realia and intonations, cited genuine documents alongside invented ones as well as distorted facts and authorship of statements. Within invented diaries, intertext became an essential style-defining factor: modern and archaic, written and spoken word turned out to have equal artistic productivity. The stylization of ego-documents of a particular epoch represented intimate truths as providential and prophetic ones. Its intertext is antinomic, possesses its own intentions and artistic objectives and carries two voices, which refer both to the prototypic style and to reality.