References to Epoch Documents as a Stylistic Feature of the Novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov "The Twelve Chairs": Classification of the Intertextual Elements

Berzina Margarita Evgen'evna ORCID: 0000-0003-0839-6655 Independent researcher, graduate of the Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University 124683, Russia, Moscow, Zelenograd, without street, 1557, sq. 20-21 margaritashanurina@mail.ru

The poetics of the novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov "The Twelve Chairs" are "poetics that are ironic in relation to established cultures, both old and new, distancing and desacralizing these cultures, exposing an element of convention and automatism in them; poetics that cares about creating a bright, beautiful world and fascinating plot action, but sets off these the effects of a certain toyiness and parody in modeling the world" ^{[1, p. 72]}.

As for J. Derrida "there is nothing outside the text" ^{[2, p. 318]}, so for Ilf and Petrov there is nothing outside of what was said: "Life through the eyes of Ilf and Petrov is a way of existence ... of texts" ^{[3, p. 18]} (M. Kaganskaya and Z. Bar-Sella meant, of course, artistic texts, but, in particular in fact, they are not the only ones who are important to the co-authors), "... the style created by Ilf and Petrov is entirely focused on what already exists" ^{[4, p. 100]}.

To date, there is only one classification of intertextual material in the novel "The Twelve Chairs", which belongs to Yu. To Shcheglov. The researcher notes the realization of the "alien word" on several levels of the first work about Ostap Bender:

1. The plot. It is based on the archetypal motive of the search, echoing primarily with the detective story "The Six Napoleons" by Arthur Conan Doyle. According to Shcheglov, distinct roll calls can also be traced in secondary storylines: "For example, the arrival of Ippolit Matveevich in Stargorod to his former janitor Tikhon is the Soviet embodiment of the ancient motif "old house and faithful servant"" ^{[1, p. 73]}.

2. The character system: the images of many of the novel's characters tend towards archetypes. Shcheglov cites the following example: the archetype of a single-minded hero who is accompanied by clueless and spoiling companions: "compare Odysseus' companions who ate the sacred bulls" ^{[1, p. 74]}. This category of archetype image includes, for example, the elderly keeper of secrets related to wealth (Madame Petukhov).

3. Genre and composition plans. Firstly, the composition "The Twelve Chairs", referring to the genre of the travel novel, is based on the ancient motif of wandering, coming into contact with different spheres of life, meeting various kinds of "monsters" (Homer, Cervantes, Smollett, Gogol). Secondly, the composition of the novel is characterized by such elements of classical literature as insert short stories, letters, author's lyrical digressions. "Ilf and Petrov's novel structure looks like a bundle of canonical narrative and compositional techniques, like an anthology of well-known plot and stylistic techniques" ^{[1, p. 75]}.

4. Phraseological and stylistic plans. "In the syntax, structure of the phrase, period and paragraph, intonation pattern, rhetorical and poetic figures" ^{[1, p. 75]}, a huge number of allusions to world literature can be traced. It is this outline of the novel that is primarily the object of study in this appendix.

5. Pathos. Commenting on the means of creating satire in The Twelve Chairs, Shcheglov writes the following: "Elements of farcical comedy and eccentricity — physical violence, fights, chases, screams, jumps, falls, etc., as well as a comically detached, quasi-intellectual manner of describing all this — are typical not so much for Russian literature of the XIX century. ... how much for the Moliere and especially the Dickensian school of European humor" ^{[1, p. 76]}.

At the same time, the difference between the first and the third of the identified plans is not fully understood, since both of them somehow imply the realization of intertextuality at the motivic, i.e. narrative level. In addition, it is quite difficult to separate the elements of a "foreign word" according to Shcheglov's proposed principle: most of the allusions will relate to several (and sometimes all) of the listed levels at once.

In general, the difficulty of using typology to analyze the novel "The Twelve Chairs" lies, firstly, in the fact that most of the fragments of someone else's speech used in the novel do not have one specific pretext, but relate to the so-called "resonant field", understood, according to V. Toporov, as an installation to refer "to complex compositions of the central such as gluing literary characters, dressing up, renaming, and other kinds of camouflage" ^{[5, p. 35]}.

The problem that researchers of the "alien word" are forced to face is extremely relevant in the analysis of Ilf and Petrov. A. Agapov, in an article on the role of quotation in the work of V. Yerofeyev, formulates it as follows: "do they create additional meaning, do they point to one or another subtext and other cases of citation when the author refers on well-known texts" ^[6]. Shcheglov also comments on the complexity of this issue: "in practical criticism, such distinctions are often underestimated (or even fundamentally discarded), and intertextuality, i.e. the effect based on the activation of differences, is illegibly attributed to any coincidences and parallels" ^{[1, p. 79]}.

The difficulty lies in the amount of material that must first be checked for intertextuality, and then classified. Thus, the enumeration of quotations and allusions (with small comments) from the novel "The Twelve Chairs" occupies 361 pages of Shcheglov's "Reader's Companion". Considering that there are forty-three chapters in the novel, and in each of them Shcheglov identifies on average about ten to twelve explicit or hidden quotations, their total number tends to number five hundred. Most of the inaccurate quotations are references to Russian classical literature (statistically, the most frequent references are to Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky).

However, classical Russian literature of the 19th century, as well as fiction in general, is by no means the only group of pretexts of the "Twelve Chairs". Previously, researchers noted, but did not take into account, the fact that Ilf and Petrov also work with non-fiction sources. The appeal to them often determines the stylistic flavor of the work, reflecting the peculiarities of the NEP era, primarily through the speech of her contemporaries.

Of course, the novel "The Twelve Chairs" is not a historical monograph or even a historical novel, but, as the main researcher of the work of "two young savages" Shcheglov noted, "despite their caricatured and farcical poetics, the novels of Ilf and Petrov give a global image of their era, in a sense more complete and epically objective, than many works ... of the 20-30s." ^{[1, p. 11]}. Ultimately, the reason for the co—authors' reference to documents of a particular era (reports, articles, guidebooks) is an artistic task, consisting in an objective reflection of a certain time, primarily through the consciousness of contemporaries, through language.

To some extent, the method used by Ilf and Petrov resembles the one analyzed in his work "Pushkin in his work on historical sources" by G. P. Blok. The researcher of Pushkin's historical prose pointed out the importance of the stylistic work that Pushkin carried out in order to create "not a flat, but a three-dimensional image" ^{[7, p. 69]} of the Pugachev uprising, which the reader should get an idea of as a result of acquaintance with different voices and points of view of contemporaries.

Ilf and Petrov are also extremely interested in the stylistics of the cited sources. A fairly large number of cases of referring to someone else's speech are dictated by the desire to "evoke in the reader's soul ... the general cultural and speech flavor of the era" ^{[1, p. 92]}. Let us cite each of these cases.

In the book "Pushkin in his work on historical Sources," Blok not only describes Pushkin's treatment of a particular source, but also provides a classification of quotations used by the author (a quotation hereafter refers to the repetition of elements of the pretext within the framework of a newly created work — according to the understanding of the term by N. Fateeva, who argued that a quotation is always aimed at reader's recognition, and therefore it is primarily distinguished by the preservation of predication ^{[8, pp. 25-38]}).

According to the Block, quotations are divided, on the one hand, into explicit and hidden, and on the other — into reference and illustrative. It is this principle that will be used to study the allusions to non-fiction sources in the novel The Twelve Chairs.

By explicit quotations, the Block means those that are typed in italics or enclosed in quotation marks; by implicit — those that are not indicated in the text as quotations.

Ilf and Petrov's novel is a work of fiction, therefore, the indicated quotations from one source or another are practically absent. The cases of explicit quotations include the quoting of guidebooks: first, the guidebook from the book of 1926, which Ostap read by the light of a shoddy kerosene lantern.:

"On the high right bank is the town of Vasyuki. From here, forest materials, resin, bast, matting are sent, and consumer goods are brought here for the region, located 50 kilometers from the railway. The city has 8,000 inhabitants, a state-owned cardboard factory with 320 workers, a small iron foundry, a brewery and tanneries. From educational institutions, except for general education, the forestry college" ^{[9, p. 220]}.

The quote is completely accurate in everything except the name of the city. In fact, the description in the book ("Volga region. Nature, life, economy. A guide to the Volga, Oka, Kama, Vyatka and Belaya". L., 1926) referred to the city of Vetluga — there is a note about this in the comments to the novel by Odessky and Feldman, and in Shcheglov's "Reader's Companion" ^{[1, p. 310]}.

Drifting on the waves in an old boat (chapter XXXVIII), the Concessionaire quotes, interrupting for remarks, another guidebook, this time — Cheboksary:

"We pay attention to the very beautifully located Cheboksary... There are currently 7,702 residents in Cheboksary... Founded in 1555, the city has preserved several very interesting churches. In addition to the administrative institutions of the Chuvash Republic, there are: a workers' faculty, a party school, a pedagogical college, two secondary schools, a museum, a scientific society and a library... At Cheboksary pier and at the bazaar, you can see Chuvash and Cheremis, distinguished by their appearance" ^{[9, p. 230]}.

Shcheglov notes in the Reader's Companion that "quoting a guidebook is a characteristic element of a romantic—ironic travel essay" ^{[1, p. 310]}. The comic effect is created thanks to the style — the guidebook seems to have a certain inviting character, which Bender himself sneers at: "Let's give up the pursuit of diamonds and increase the population of Cheboksary to 7,704 people. Eh?" ^{[9, p. 230]}. The interest in the presence of a party school and a working faculty in the city also fits into the general cultural background.

It is necessary to make a reservation: in the above cases, Ilf and Petrov's appeal to a documentary source is clearly traced, but in most of the cases listed below, it is impossible to confirm or deny the fact of such an appeal. The co-authors could not so much work on the text of the documents as simply use their vocabulary, which had already become common. It is known, for example, that Ilf had a habit of recording phrases snatched from the everyday context in notebooks.

A significant part of the hidden quotations (that is, quotations not visually indicated) from the group of non-fiction texts we have named are fragments of statements by V. Lenin and K. Marx.:

1. "THE CAUSE OF HELPING THE DROWNING IS THE WORK OF THE DROWNING THEMSELVES" ^{[9, p. 226]}. The source of the statement is Marx's work: "The emancipation of the working class must be won by the working class itself." Marx, General. the Charter of the International workers' associations]. Shcheglov, as well as earlier — Odessky and Feldman — indicate as a source Lenin's speech at the ivth conference of trade unions and factory committees of Moscow in 1918 ^{[1, p. 317]}..

2. "Don't think about it. When they beat you, you'll cry, but in the meantime, don't linger! Learn to trade!" [cited in 1, p. 315]. The last rhetorical exclamation is the slogan of the beginning of the NEP, formulated by Lenin in the early twenties, but Shcheglov points to another source, Lenin's report "N.E.P. and the tasks of political enlightenment.": "The state must learn to trade in such a way that industry satisfies the peasantry, so that the peasantry satisfies their needs with trade" [quoted in 1, p. 317];

3. "The ice has broken, gentlemen of the jury! The ice has moved" [cited in 1, pp. 354-355]. Ostap's aphorism is drawn from Lenin's journalistic work: "The ice has broken. The Soviets have won all over the world" [Lenin, Conquered and Recorded, article in Pravda dated March 6, 1919, see Collected Works, vol. 37, p. 513] [cited in 1, pp. 354-355].

4. "How much opium is for the people?" [quoted in 1, p. 192]. Ostap's challenging question to Father Fyodor refers to the famous saying of Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people" [Criticism of Hegel. philosophy of Law], which was also used by Lenin [Socialism and Religion] [cited in 1, p. 192].

The appeal to the language of Lenin and Marx is supposed to be a characteristic feature of the early Stalinist era and its linguistic context. For Ilf and Petrov, it is important, as mentioned above, to recreate not only the details of Soviet life, but also the living language of the described time. However, inaccurate quotations from Lenin and Marx in Ostap's mouth are just as much a means of creating comedy as outdated poetry. The combinator never utters other people's words in the context that was meant by the original source: "opium for the people" is just an insult to a competitor in treasure hunting, "the ice has broken" is a description of a breakthrough in a dubious scam. The vocabulary of Soviet discourse certainly corresponds to the era depicted, but it is as much a part of the game of travesty as the elements of monarchical rhetoric.

In fact, images of so-called "former people" play a significant role in the "Twelve Chairs": "half-digested pre-revolutionary material continually peeks out ... from under the forms of the new reality" ^{[1, p. 20]}. This was reflected in the language. The most obvious example is the speech of a Combinator during a meeting of the secret union of sword and plowshare, which raised money allegedly for the restoration of the monarchical system. Let us pay attention to the formulations of the Great Combinator. Although they are not examples of strong intertextuality, they nevertheless have their sources.:

1. "Madam,— he [Ostap] said, "we are happy to see in your face… He did not know who he was happy to see in Elena Stanislavovna" ^{[1, p. 217]}. Ostap's rhetoric clearly correlates with monarchical discourse, the most possible source of it, according to Shcheglov, is Nicholas II's throne speech at the opening of the 1st State Duma: "I greet in your person those best people who..." ^{[1, p. 217]}.

2. "Of all the lavish phrases of the tsarist regime, only some kind of "graciously commanded" turned in my head" ^{[1, p. 217]}. The turnover was borrowed by Ilf and Petrov from the texts of imperial decrees and orders. Shcheglov indicates the following confirming source: "The Sovereign Emperor has deigned to command me to address the governments of the states...." [Bark, Chapter from memoirs, p. 20] ^{[1, p. 217]}.

3. "People are crying out for help from all over our vast country..." ^{[1, p. 218]}. Clerical office, typical for documents of tsarist Russia. Again, it is impossible to say whether the co-authors referred to specific documents or reproduced elements of rhetoric gleaned from living life. Shcheglov cites the following as possible sources:: ""From all over my native land, I receive requests, testifying to the ardent desire of the Russian people to make their efforts... [from the highest rescript to I. L. Goremykin, Chronicle of the War of 1914-15, 06/27/15]""; ""Throughout the Russian land, from the foot of the Throne to the poor man's hut, the tremor of national anxiety does not cease" [from the appeal of the Novgorod nobles to the tsar in 1916, in the book. Kozakov, The Collapse of the Empire, vol. 2, p. 258]" ^{[1, p. 218]}.

Ostap's desire to look like a monarchist is conveyed primarily by his carefully thought-out speech by his co-authors. At the same time, the appeal to monarchical rhetoric is dictated by the goal of recreating the image of a bygone era in Elena Stanislavovna's poor living room.

Of course, the desperate desire of the "former people" to return to the world gone with the wind is comically presented and eventually leads only to mass arrest.

Nevertheless, this combination of seemingly incongruous sources is significant, which the co-authors somehow addressed in the speech of the main character of the monorama, Ostap. On the one hand, he is a chameleon character who adapts not only his appearance (no wonder he carries a briefcase containing, for example, a police cap), but also his speech to the circumstances, he is a brilliant fraud. On the other hand, the fusion of Soviet and pre—revolutionary discourses is an obvious feature of an era already characterized by a new way of life, but still preserving in cultural memory the "heavy legacy of the tsarist regime."

The main role of explicit and hidden quotations is stylistic, so they do not indicate a subtext or additional meaning. The method of Ilf and Petrov in this case partly resembles the method of working with V. Yerofeyev's "foreign word" — in the form in which it was described by A. Agarov in the article "Sir, why do you eat your wives?": on the role of a quote from Venedikt Yerofeyev. Quotations are not understood as keys to hidden subtexts, but become "a constructive element on which the text is built" ^[6].

Speaking about the functions of quotation in historical prose, Blok calls the following: firstly, persuasion, the reinforcement of the author's words by someone else's testimony, which is given for greater persuasiveness (usually verbatim); secondly, the decoration of the narrative with "an example of the language spoken or written in the time depicted by the author" ^{[7, p. 25]}. Thus, based on the function, the Block distinguishes citations from reference and illustrative ones.

Focusing on the typology of the Block, we can say that absolutely all the quotations given above serve an illustrative function in the text, as they serve to saturate the narrative with elements of the language characteristic of the early Stalinist period: it is already dominated by new rhetoric, but the "sometimes glimpsed" turns of the old regime have been preserved: "The reader does not just learn in the The novel presents familiar situations and objects, but gets the opportunity to admire them as parts of a unique cultural and historical ensemble ("Russia of the 20s"), capable of entering the gallery of already well-known paradigms of this kind (for example, "Hellenism", "Pushkin era", "Mark Twain's provincial America", "pre-revolutionary Russia"etc.)" ^{[1, p. 58]}.

Blok also noted that illustrative quotations are often characterized by "the author's somewhat ironic attitude towards the language of the source" ^{[7, p. 25]}, which is perhaps equally true of the lavish phrases of the tsarist regime and the quotations of Marx and Lenin in the novel The Twelve Chairs.

This is often true of quotations from works of fiction, especially Russian classics. They are not the subject of study in this appendix, but nevertheless, the following quotation should be mentioned as an example of confirmation. According to the Block, it is classified as explicit and illustrative.:

"... Very simple, in a family way. The widow sleeps and has a dream. I was sorry to wake you up. "Don't wake her up at dawn." Alas! I had to leave a note for my beloved: "I'm leaving with a report to Novokhopersk" ^{[9, p. 102]}.

The quote from Fet's poem clearly comically contrasts with the clerical vocabulary of the second part of the statement, as well as with the "prosaic" situation as a whole: Bender did not wake his wife not because he admired her sleep, but because he robbed her.

Turning to the reference quotations, it should be noted that they, according to the Block, serve the role of persuasion, that is, the reinforcement of the author's words by someone else's testimony, which is not found in the novel by Ilf and Petrov. It is worth saying that this is generally a rare technique for artistic works.

Summing up, we can conclude that Ilf and Petrov often turn to non-fiction sources when polishing the language of the novel. Dividing quotations into explicit and hidden ones seems to be quite productive for investigating these cases of "someone else's word", however, when analyzing "The Twelve Chairs", it was not possible to identify quotations that would not perform an illustrative function, which suggests that the typology of the Block based on the function of the quotation is more relevant for descriptive historical writings than for artistic ones. and it cannot be used as a basis for classifying all the figures of the intertext in the novel "The Twelve Chairs".

The appeal of the co-authors, nicknamed "young savages" by N. Mandelstam ^{[10, p. 345]}, to the documents of the epoch, is thus determined by three factors: firstly, the illustrative function, the artistic task of depicting the color of the epoch; secondly, these appeals are part of a travesty game, the realization of parody; thirdly, — a means of revealing the image of the main character, the Great Combinator Ostap.