Pre-post effect/paradox: conceptualisation of the term and prospects of its use in literary studies

Demidov Nikita Mikhailovich ORCID: 0000-0001-8336-4333 Postgraduate student, Department of Theory of Literature, Lomonosov Moscow State University 123181, Russia, Moscow, Isakovsky str., 28k2, sq. 574 josefkessler.vonwissenstein@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The literary process as a complex phenomenon is considered in science from several points of view at once, and it is desirable that intermediate conclusions within the framework of literary disciplines form a synthesis of scientific knowledge that could serve as an accurate description of the literary panorama of a particular scale and historical period. The issues of literary evolution are traditionally the responsibility of genre studies, comparative studies and the close interaction of literary history and literary theory. The latter should provide justification for phenomena in the history of literature, analyzing, among other things, literary criticism, which often acts as a reaction to a term or phenomenon at the time of its heyday or origin (such as the concept of "dialectic of the soul", introduced into Russian criticism by N. G. Chernyshevsky and subsequently subjected to serious scientific understanding). There is a need, with all the differences in the methodologies of these disciplines, to come to some universals that, if they did not indicate stable and characteristic signs of literary evolution at the same time at the theoretical and comparative historical level, but at least reflected some atypical cases of the development of literature at the interdisciplinary level, which cause the greatest difficulties in science. One of the most successful such attempts can be called the term pre-post effect/paradox, introduced into literary studies by the Czech scientist Ivo Pospisil, but not yet included in the general theoretical base; let's get acquainted with the term and study its content and prospects for interaction with related concepts of the theoretical and literary apparatus.

The preliminary pre-post effect can be defined as a complex process of the formation of literary works at the junction of native and foreign artistic traditions, when the recipient literature, when borrowing certain artistic techniques of the "donor literature", assimilates them superficially, not in full, while forming an interesting synthesis of such shallow borrowing with an autochthonous tradition for the host literature. As an example, we can point to elements of sentimentalism in Dostoevsky's early work ("Poor People"), Baroque in Gogol's "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" (as the researcher rightly notes in one of his works, these are the 1830s - Baroque as a genre already belongs to the past) ^{[16, s. 61]} and many others. Russian Russian and Slavic literatures Pospisil developed his concept on the basis of Russian and Slavic literatures in their interaction with each other against the background of the pan–European literary space, which generally reflects the vector of scientific interests of the scientist - he consistently uses the term to postulate the uniqueness of both Russian and other Slavic literatures, without using it in the context of other literary traditions. Does this mean that the application of the concept is not only limited by the geography of artistic creation, but also does not claim autonomy as a separate theoretical and literary concept, and the process described by it indicates only the specifics of Slavic literature? Let's try to prove that the mechanism underlying the pre-post effect is still implemented as an independent tool. Let's consider how a scientist understands the history of literature and comparative studies — without this, it is difficult to describe the pre-post effect as a term located at the junction of several literary disciplines at once, and make our assumptions about the prospects of the term in the scientific base of literary studies.

Ivo Pospisil in his works speaks about both the history of literature and the theory of literary history; the scientist associates the need to theorize the chronology of literary development with its a priori interdisciplinary specificity. Thus, in chapter 1 of his fundamental work "K teorii ruské literatury a jejím souvislostem" entitled "Problém teorie literárních dějin a jeho interdisciplinární souvislosti: prostorovost/spaciálnost/areálovost", the title itself reflects the spatiality, specificity and areality of literary creativity of Slavic countries, which are directly key parameters of their development ^[14] . The choice of these characteristics is not accidental: it is enough to recall such scientists of the past as Frank Vollman, Pavel Josef Shafarik and Joseph Dobrovsky — the patriarchs of Slavic studies, whose distinctive feature of their works is a comprehensive philological and cultural view of the literary process as such and understanding of language and literature as a whole (language as a material, and literature as its implementation), in which the scope of scientific research is not limited to the actual text of the work of art. Thus, the idea itself is not new, but the need for its "renaissance" coincides with the intensive development and complication of certain literary disciplines, especially comparative studies. The morphological approach in the history of literature (purely textual, poetological) is useful and reflects the immanent structure of the text, but for its deep knowledge it is important not only to actively use the achievements of such methodological directions as formalism, structuralism, poststructalism, etc., but also to strengthen the general cultural context as a broader concept that accommodates the literary process, due to the close humanities, primarily history and sociology. The originality of Pospisil's approach lies in the fact that the "methodological shift" of the Czech scientist a priori does not represent the history of literature in isolation from comparative studies, moreover, from his point of view, the problems of comparative literature are of a fundamental theoretical nature, and the key provisions of the historical and literary process depend on their resolution. The scientist consistently identifies the outer circle of comparative studies associated with the area and "spatiality" (external links of literatures and their interaction; the "support" indicated by us from other disciplines is carried out just at this level), and the inner one responsible for the development of the genre (genology as a separate discipline studying the formation, development and modification of genre consciousness from a historical perspective). Such a broad understanding of comparative studies is a characteristic feature of a scientist, although the first difficulties arise already at the stage of including areal studies in the area of comparative literary studies. Commenting on the rejection of areal studies by some philologists at the beginning of the XXI century, Pospisil admits that "two reasons can be seen: on the one hand, an intuitive feeling that this is something new, with a perspective and a chance to absorb or overshadow traditionalist studies, on the other hand - rather in exceptional cases — also a serious fear of losing the "craft", the philological core itself" ^[14]. The area is a large-scale natural, political or public spaces based on geographical space, which are under the jurisdiction, in addition to the sociology and history we have indicated, as well as political science, philosophy, psychology and other humanities, which are a special field of application of language. The importance of language and texts as the starting point of such a complex integration is emphasized. The Czech Russian scholar calls for the study of language and literature as a connected whole in all spheres of their application, recognizing that the integrity and structurality of such studies is still in doubt, but such an approach is necessary now. The question arises: what, apart from clarifying literary, linguistic and cultural realities that help clarify certain stages of the development of literature in a particular period, does the very concept of the area and its study give? The scientist gives the answer: "overcoming the immanent isolation of philology, and on the other hand, the gradual unification of linguistics and literary studies as already disconnected parts of the original philological unity." It can be said that such syncretism of linguistics and the science of literature (it was emphasized by the predecessor of I. Pospisil, Frank Vollman, who in his studies of Slavic literatures went far beyond philology) inevitably includes a synchronic and diachronic aspect in order to establish the specifics of the text against the background of an extensive historical and literary panorama, and The areal aspect assumes taking into account all non-textual realities that are of auxiliary importance and have an impact on the perception and existence of a literary text in space and time. Taking into account that the pre-post effect/paradox reacts to a certain phenomenon in non-native literature and at the same time introduces it into the autochthonous, giving impetus to its further development, one can agree with the scientist that such a phenomenon should simultaneously be relevant both to the comparative aspect and the historical one. It is also true that for the normal functioning of the term, it is first necessary to build a concept of literary development that would ideally reflect in equal detail the stadiality of this process along with the phenomenon of inter-literary relations, which are complicated precisely by a high concentration of non-philological factors. In our opinion, areal research is only groping for its subject due to its youth as an autonomous field of scientific knowledge, which Pospisil confirms: "a negative assessment of areal research is usually associated with the fact that they may turn out to be a new already mentioned "trash can", i.e. an area where everything can be brought together without coming to what- or new knowledge — this field has no boundaries and its own subject of research. This is not surprising, because new or old disciplines are looking for their boundaries and definitions "on the go"" ^{[14, s. 47]}. In order to solve this problem, it is critically important, in our opinion, to establish a certain hierarchy of non-literary facts in relation to the text of the work in order to streamline their hierarchy, where the most important role will be played by ethical and aesthetic factors that interact more closely with the literary source as the art of speech. Areal studies include the category of spatiality, the interdisciplinary aspect and the history of literature — and in addition to being overloaded with research areas, they cannot boast of the obvious relationship between them, which is reflected in the clarification of the semaseological boundaries of the term "area". Thus, the question immediately arises about the relationship between the history of literature and cultural dialogue between countries, the complex and contradictory interactions of individual social sciences and philology, the problem of a specific area and the artistic world in them, related to the image of a stranger in their native culture (imagology), etc. It seems a more logical step not to expand the boundaries of philology, which Pospisil tends to do, but to use one or another tool of comparative studies based on specific tasks, which is also true for the pre-post effect.

Despite the weak structuring of areal studies as a separate discipline, there is a sound grain in Pospisil's arguments about the cultural unity of literature, language and auxiliary fields of humanitarian knowledge: the axiological aspect with such a broad approach appears in a more definite scientific light, not limited to literary criticism proper. Let me explain: for the pre-post effect/paradox, the key aspect is, as we have already noted, the reaction to Western literary samples — and samples in the most general form. Most often, their role is played by phenomena reflecting more or less large theoretical and literary concepts, such as genre and direction. Commenting on the external approach to the study of literature, the great comparative scholar Rene Wellek noted that with all the variety of approaches to determining the specifics of spiritual activity affecting the functioning of a literary work (biography and psychology of the creator, social and political situation, "zeitgeist"), they are unjustifiably determined (which sharply diverges from the concept of Pospisil, who, as we have shown, external cultural and extraliterary factors are very important and represent a melting pot, where not only one sphere of existence of a literary text is taken into account), and, importantly, "the totality of human cultural aspirations should be understood as an integral system of self-developing sequences, and each of the sequences has its own norms, not necessarily identical to the norms another sequence, even nearby" ^[11]. Unlike Wellek, Pospisil takes a less compromise position regarding the ratio of literary and non-literary factors and classifies them based not on methods (biographical, Freudian, psychological, etc.), but on the potential unpredictability of the area, its mobile cultural content. Recognizing the complexity of the non-textual environment makes it difficult to identify the classification of elements, but Pospisil finds his own way to link the "external" directly with literary creativity.

Speaking about the comparative historical significance of the history of literature (theory of the history of literature), it is necessary to focus on the most important problem that the researcher must solve: what exactly should be included in the history of literature, which phenomena are canonical, fundamental, and which are not? Pospisil writes: "This is a crucial moment where literary methodology, literary theory, literary history and, of course, literary criticism come together, but only one of these disciplines is axiological" ^{[14, p. 50]}. The axiological aspect, according to him, remains underestimated, despite modern attempts at actualization, including on the basis of a philosophical and cultural approach to the study of types of mentalities and spiritual and value perception of artistic creativity ^[6]. Meanwhile, for understanding the mechanism of the pre-post effect, axiology is of great importance, actualizing, as we noted above, the categories of aesthetic and ethical as important markers of the specificity of a literary phenomenon, the justification of which is directed — from a comparative historical and theoretical literary point of view - the pre-post effect. First of all, the axiological aspect breaks out beyond the immanent literary methods, which are excessively focused on the structure of the text and do not pay attention to important extra—textual phenomena of reality in the space of which the text functions (as the most obvious example is the formal method in Russian literary studies). The axiological context itself is not only connected with the reaction of literary criticism to the writer's work (for all its importance) — it is no coincidence that in an attempt to generalize the "axiological axis" of a certain era in Western Russian studies, the term "theory of literary history" is used as an attempt to characterize the study of literary tradition as the sum of the highest achievements in the field of artistic creativity. It should be about the literary canon, but not in isolation, but from a cultural and spatial point of view (areal), as well as in an aesthetic and social dimension, which is emphasized by other modern works ^[9]. In the context of the pre-post effect, this observation is interesting primarily because it is the canon as a whole that reacts to certain genre phenomena of foreign literature, which is formed spontaneously and unpredictably due to a similar characteristic of the literary process. The basis of the pre-post effect is borrowing at the level of a literary direction or genre, which the main, canonical line of literary development assimilates as having a significant status — otherwise, the very conversation about the concept of influence will be meaningless, but at the same time the scope of the term does not extend beyond general changes in the literary process, and the questions of individual poetics of individual authors should be, according to the logic of the disclosure of the term, they are compared with the historical and literary context as a whole, where the correlation of foreign and domestic models in favor of the latter is the essence of this unusual term.

The term we are considering consists of a pre- and post-stage. The description of the mechanism of their work is associated with some difficulties. As we have already written, the pre-post effect was originally conceived to substantiate the specifics of Russian literature (also Slavic, but Pospisil expressed it declaratively). Russian Russian literature has been receiving the impulses of the poetics of "strong" European literature mainly since the XVIII century in several waves: this makes certain adjustments to the theory that one Russian of the XVIII century, which is considered the forge of Russian literature, was enough to thoroughly absorb these impulses." ^{[14, s. 96]}. The researcher faces two tasks: to establish at what point in literary evolution the effect under study is triggered, and only then to find out what exactly is responsible for the implementation of such a specific type of borrowing. Despite the importance of literary trends and genres as complex structural units that are the first to assimilate the poetical elements of other people's literature, participating in the "pre-stage", excessive schematization of these fundamental theoretical and literary concepts threatens to standardize those phenomena in literature that are recognized as unique, outstanding: Thus, the scientist rightly points out that Pushkin cannot be associated exclusively with romanticism, Mayakovsky with futurism, etc. Such theoretical constructions, indeed, speak not just about simplifying the representation of the creative path of an individual writer, but about ignoring the evolutionary specificity of literature achieved through the action of the pre-post effect/paradox. The peculiarity of the term is that it reflects a characteristic evolutionary process with visible support for its main figures, immediately combining the evolution of literature as a whole and the accentuation of the development of creative strategies of individual authors — those that make up the literary canon of recipient literature. It is important, in our opinion, that such a descriptive strategy greatly helps the researcher to orient himself in the inevitable, over time, new interpretations of remarkable literary phenomena, including quite original ones, allowing the researcher to return to the objective circumstances of the history and critical perception of a literary source. For example, the study of Gogol's work as a writer who anticipated the poetics of the avant-garde, especially absurdism, is quite productive and allows us to look at the poetics of the work from a different angle, but there is also a danger of skewing towards a non-historical discourse that does not take into account the autochthonous roots of the writer's work. Let's also add the following: no canon can be established exclusively by representatives of the national literatures of this zone, including in the case of a more traditional, "pure evolution", when the poetics of someone else's literature is a role model without subsequent creative transformation and there is no need to talk about the pre-post effect. At the post-stage, an original work is obtained, which is very likely to become part of the literary canon, and the introduced elements play an important role in this.

Unfortunately, the scientist does not formulate a universal pattern for the successful "interaction" of native and alien, often limiting himself to referring to the biographical context of the author or his involvement in a wide historical and cultural context. This is largely due to the insufficient theoretical development of the axiology of a work of art at a more local level, at the level of the host autochthonous tradition. How can I fix this? It seems to us that the "impulses" of someone else's literature owe their superficial assimilation to the special behavior of both a multitude of extra—literary factors (primarily the area according to Pospisil's definition) and a narrower designation of the non-functional reality surrounding a particular work of fiction or genre significant for a certain epoch - a literary fact. In literary studies, it was thoroughly considered by Tynyanov, who wrote that "in literature there are phenomena of different layers; in this sense, there is no complete change of one literary trend to another. But this change is in another sense — the dominant trends, the dominant genres are changing" ^[10]. Despite the fact that the Russian scientist wrote about the literary fact in relation to the internal evolution of literature, directly within the framework of the autochthonous tradition, implying a difficult moment of evolutionary change when a particular genre is pushed from the center to the periphery or vice versa, his observations are important for the idea of the pre-stage of the pre/post effect as an intermediate stage between borrowing elements of the poetics of foreign literatures and their existence in a certain status in the literature borrowing these elements; in other words, when the phenomenon is just coming into fashion. With the successful operation of the pre-stage, an alien literary phenomenon gives itself up to an assessment subordinate to historical projection and extra–literary factors - and such factors, according to Tynyanov, lie in the sphere of everyday life: ""artistic life" therefore, according to the functional role of art in it, something different from art, but in the form of phenomena they touch. Different methods of dealing with the same phenomena contribute to different selection of these phenomena, and therefore the very forms of artistic life are different from art" ^{[10, p. 264]}. We have before us the axiological aspect of the perception of literary phenomena in the national tradition, which has a decisive impact on the unpredictability of the literary process, generalization, canonization, or, on the contrary, the oblivion of literary phenomena — in the case of both Pospisil and Tynyanov, systems of major genres and directions. Interestingly, Tynyanov, unlike his Czech colleague, who uses an immanent method — formalist, literally the opposite — attaches the same importance to the extra-textual reality, spatial and temporal transformations of culture, however, for the Russian scientist its local, even chamber aspect is more important. A well-known example of an epistolary genre is characteristic, based on intimate, friendly correspondence and being a literary fact with literary value, depending on the peculiarities of its perception in a particular era; these features are directly related to the sphere of everyday life, where writing has appeal. Of course, a literary fact may not be formed from the fact of everyday life and the writer's personal life adjacent to it, but in the case of a successful formation of a genre or direction, such a local environment always has a certain decisive influence. Tynyanov warns against the careless use of the psychological or autobiographical method in literary criticism due to the temptation to exaggerate the importance of these extra-textual factors. In addition to the fact that this warning should not be understood as distrust of these methods, it is important to have a spatiotemporal understanding of literary individuality against the background of the change and evolution of genres and directions - and not a separate study of literary individuality or the personality of the author in general (Tynyanov also warns about the danger of mixing these two concepts). The outstanding formalist writes about phenomena that are already in the bosom of the Russian literary process and obey its laws, albeit difficult to define. At the same time, Pospisil's concept differs from Tynyanov's by the level of generalization: for him, not only extra-textual factors are important, which can be more or less clearly characterized as conditions for the formation of a literary fact, but even non-philological factors; for him, the issues of literary evolution lie not just in the complex struggle of different trends, as in Tynyanov, but in the mainstream of an areally understood genre ^[13]. The comparative aspect is natural here in connection with the consideration of Russian literature as a complex system surrounded by other (interacting with it foreign literatures). In our opinion, the theoretical justification of the pre-stage could be supported by the fact that the views on the literary evolution of Pospisil and Tynyanov are not mutually exclusive, but, on the contrary, complement each other in a linear sequence. The "transfer" and, accordingly, the core of the pre-stage will be the axiological aspect, unpredictable, but fully present both at the stage of reaction to a certain phenomenon and its borrowing, as well as accommodation in the recipient literature and further fate within the framework of this new literary tradition. In order to create clear and, as far as possible, regulated theoretical foundations for the practical implementation of the pre/post effect as a tool for literary analysis, we would suggest limiting the use of the term primarily to the framework of the traditional comparative method with an emphasis on the autochthonous/allochthonous phenomena considered in line with the axiological approach. In this regard, areal research, as a discipline that is rather vague in terms of the object of study, at the moment, in our opinion, still needs an additional number of approbations and systematization, and therefore the range of phenomena that do not relate to the literary artifact itself should be narrowed as much as possible, based on the concept of literary fact as an area of axiological application. A wide range of literary facts and the transformation of literary models as a basis for explaining the specifics of a particular phenomenon, thus, will accompany the logic of considering the axiological aspect. The latter must be presented and disclosed in such a way that the consideration of the value structure of the artifact is not thought in isolation, on the one hand, from the philosophical and aesthetic understanding of artistic value, and on the other - from a strictly literary approach, thus combining at least two types of analysis of the artistic structure of the work: the actual analytical work on the consideration of the necessary non—literary factors (social, cultural and other contexts) and the subsequent immanent analysis of the artistic structure of the work in order to actualize the external and internal contours of the interpretation of the work. The role of the pre-post effect in relation to this process can be described as auxiliary, allowing us to select the key parameters of axiological consideration, which clearly manifest themselves precisely in the process of historical interaction of autochthonous literature with others. The task of the researcher should be to detect traces of genre transformation under the result of the pre-post effect and consider the signs of such transformation as a marker of the origin of the axiological integrity of the artifact (which is invariably present surrounded by other factors). The pre-post effect thus strengthens the analytical approach to axiology, stimulates a more consistent comprehension of the history of perception of a literary work. Thus, the pre-post effect represents the critical perception of the text in close connection with the history of the transformation of the genre model, reflecting the specifics of this reproduction and being the "trigger" of critical perception, respectively For example, it is indicative of Gogol's "Overcoat" that the story itself is the result of an unusual transformation of non-literary genre properties, namely the French physiological essay and the German (Hoffmann) romantic tradition; the genetic connection with them remains, but at the same time the image of the little man himself is rethought, the value attitude towards him is already different. It can be said that the very superficial reaction to the elements of the poetics of foreign literature and their modification contributed to the isolation of the "Overcoat" from the many stories about a poor official created within the framework of the natural school, and attracted the attention of Khomyakov, Shevyrev, and Aksakov (as part of the polemic about the novel "Poor People" by Dostoevsky, where the critic opposes the originality of the "Overcoat" of the "tendentiousness" of the novel). A whole process is launched, where both its critical historia ("external" axiology) and the author's value understanding of his own work (internal axiology) acquire essential importance for the inclusion of a work in the literary canon. The latter is due to the fact that the author's modification of the genre as part of a writer's strategy when working on a work is certainly an axiological phenomenon: for example, the motives of the mental suffering of the main character in Pushkin's poem "Gypsies" complicate the habitual conflict of civilization and nature, reflecting naturalness and harmony, developing into a fear of losing spiritual balance, support for feelings in the surrounding world such an emphasis complicates the traditional romantic scheme, tending to a realistic attempt to analyze the fluctuations of the hero and deviating from the European romantic tradition — it has already played its role and genre "deviations" or fluctuations occur already within the framework of Russian literature.

If, following Pospisil, we adhere to the concept of synthesis of philological and social sciences, it should be assumed that the problem of the autochthonous and alien in Russian literature should also be solved in a large-scale approach combining political, economic, cultural and other studies, taking into account their linguistic and textual basis; however, it is worth noting that this very basis ideologically flexible and difficult to fix as a constant value since the earliest times of the development of Russian literature — since the Ancient Russian period. This ideological plasticity can be traced back to the 20th century, constantly undergoing transformations, but the struggle of one's own and another's as a fundamental characteristic of the development of Russian literature has always existed; according to I. Pospisil, their clash was more expressive than in the literatures of Europe. The origins of this struggle should be sought at the stage of the beginning of the emergence of writing in Russia, the appearance of the first texts and the phenomenon of diglossia. The main problem lies in the intermittent development and special genre characteristics of ancient Russian literature, which D. S. Likhachev drew attention to when analyzing the "Words about Igor's Regiment", justifying the role of the "Word" as the central text of this period ^[8]. Pospisil, following the Russian scientist, is interested in the Word first of all as the most obvious element of the evolutionary process, which stands out vividly from the mass of other secular and ecclesiastical texts and sets the tone of continuity, including poetological and genre, with its originality. The Czech scientist's desire to take into account non-philological factors is organically combined with a multidimensional study of ancient Russian literature, which implies the study of territorial issues, historical vicissitudes and cultural identity issues along with textual and linguistic issues. What is still a known difficulty for literary studies — the periodization of ancient Russian literature and its integrity — for Pospisil is connected with the question of the identity of literature and its relation to European medieval models; and as we remember, the need for the term "pre/post effect" arises in order to explain the specifics of borrowing in an inter-literary dialogue and its superficial reflection in the evolutionary paradigm of the host literature. Unfortunately, the scientist does not manage to fully link the heterogeneity of out-of-text contexts with the mechanism of the pre-post effect, but, despite this, the pre-post effect seems to be a tool that allows focusing on the problem when elements of allochthonous models are found in Russian literature (Rococo, Baroque), but they are not always successfully explained "the introduction" into a specific model of ancient Russian literature, although elements introduced "from the outside" (for example, the romantic aspect of madness in Russian literature), often need to be clarified themselves.

What does the example above show? Pospisil's constant transitions from the specifics of national literature, considered in genetic detail, starting from the Ancient Russian period, to its embeddedness in a more global context are far from strict systematization, but, significantly, they themselves are the result of a productive methodological tradition, the beginning of which was laid by D. Durishin. The Slovak comparativist not only outlined the problem of isolationism and the limitations of research work in the study of works of art, when the basis for study is limited only to the specific literature being analyzed — this idea was new only within the framework of Slavic studies — but stressed that without the fusion of the historical and literary approach with the comparative, the literary fact suffers first of all. Durishin understands the literary fact both in the Tynian sense and in a broader one, arguing that the connection between the individual and the universal in literature cannot be ignored; the concept of national literature is unthinkable without the concept of world literature as a comprehensive and universal phenomenon ^{[5, p. 7]}, regardless of the large number of modern interpretations of Goethe's theses implying reliance on a wide range of cultural and socio-historical observations ^[12]. This observation allows us to remove doubts about the possibility of using the term "pre-post effect/paradox" outside the context of Slavic literature and speaks in favor of its effective instrumental capabilities. When we talk about the problems of a single literature, which reacts to the specifics of borrowed elements in the course of inter-literary contact, we deepen the analysis, first of all, of the contact-genetic sphere of existence of literary phenomena, however, an undesirable bias appears towards diachronism, where the continuity of literary phenomena is elevated to the absolute. The typological aspect, the most complete theoretical justification of which we owe to V. M. Zhirmunsky, helps to systematize analogies and similar phenomena in the world literary process based on the general laws of literary theory — and helps to find out how clearly the materials accumulated during genetic contact studies indicate the repeatability of a certain literary phenomenon, whether it is a variant of another ^[7]. Against the large-scale background of philological and general humanitarian factors important for the functioning of literary texts, where literatures interact with each other, the pre-post effect in its pre-stage represents the stage of borrowing; the history of the development of large genre categories (the same novel) is a priori international, and it is difficult to study, for example, the history of the development of the Russian novel to limit oneself to the history of exclusively Russian literature, which formed the basis for Bakhtin's research on the novel ^[2]. The fact of superficial borrowing, which is a distinctive feature of the pre-post effect, is regulated by the post-stage: a certain phenomenon, being part of the literary fact of a foreign literary tradition, faces the unpredictability of its own adaptation (due to the above-mentioned unpredictability of the axiological aspect) as part of the literary fact of an already autochthonous tradition. According to the remark of the Romanian comparativist A. Dima, "the correlation of national achievements with foreign ones creates conditions for a clearer identification of the national identity of each literature" ^{[4, p. 191]}, and one or another literary fact becomes interesting from the point of view of typological connections. We can talk about the embeddedness of the term under study in the course of international receptions of works of art — the importance of active mutual interest of literatures in each other within the framework of the world literary process as a postulation of the specifics of each of them was pointed out by Goethe ^[1]. Russian Russian postmodernism provides a valuable reflection of the pre-post effect: the most important features of the trend (ambivalence, intertextuality, value uncertainty) were encountered before its emergence in Slavic literatures, in particular, in Czech, Polish and Russian, but it was in Russian literature that the "meeting" with postmodernism was prepared by a specifically colored phenomenon of insanity, madness or just eccentricity ^{[15, p. 2]}. His heyday is traditionally considered to be the 1920s and 1930s, namely the work of Platonov, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, although the origins can be traced back to Gogol's work. Russian Russian postmodernism in the person of V. Yerofeyev and V. Sorokin mechanically "copied" the main provisions of the Western version of postmodernism, for example, semantic ambivalence and intertextuality, but the main core was the phenomenon of Russian madness, abnormality, crisis of faith and communication, which by the end of the XX century manifested itself, including in the crisis of thick magazines. Russian Russian postmodernism, etc.), reflect the turning epochs of the literary process, the literary discoveries of which form the canon and identity of literature, including Russian literature; the pre-post effect is a term that reflects the turning epochs of the literary process, the literary discoveries of which form the canon and identity of literature, including Russian. which describes this process — not always strictly and clearly, but there is no fault of the Czech Russian in this. In our opinion, the attempt to present in general terms the mechanism of formation of a certain stage of national literature on the basis of historical and literary, comparative studies and certain branches of humanitarian knowledge was successful.

Thus, the pre-post effect as a phenomenon is in the crosshairs of comparative studies, literary history and literary theory, which are somehow affected by an essential aspect of transformation — genre modification of a work, interpreted as a certain axiological revolution, allowing a literary artifact to gain a strong position in the literary canon of the national tradition and play an important role in the literary process, including and globally. It can be stated that with insufficient theoretical and literary representation of the pre-post effect/paradox, which we have tried to fill in this article, the term itself is an important discovery designed to combine the latest developments in the field of comparative studies with the outstanding key conclusions of the Slavists of the past (up to, as we mentioned, before the XIX century: Volman, Dobrovskiy and Firstly, the balance of the literary and linguistic method in the analysis of a literary work, which in the XX–XXI centuries resulted in disputes about the stylistics of literary and linguistic stylistics (from Vinokur to Tyupa), and secondly, the importance of the interdisciplinary aspect both in the study of literary works and individual literary categories. The pre-post effect, as we believe, is a term that should firmly enter the theoretical and literary apparatus of the science of literature. Given the complexity and versatility of the area, that is, the space of genetic and contact connections of literature and numerous non-philological factors considered within the framework of political science, psychology, sociology, etc., which Pospisil quite rightly takes into account, we would recommend using the term when studying transitional stages in the history of literature and the development of creativity of individual writers (necessarily linking them with the general literary the process both within the framework of the autochthonous tradition and within the framework of world literature, since the pre-post effect as a mechanism serves the categories that most vividly reflect a particular characteristic of national literature, its originality; the researcher's interest in finding typological connections with similar phenomena in other literatures is fundamentally important), which will allow in the future to create the most the complete history of the literature of the studied country. The pre-post effect works when studying such transitional phenomena as, for example, the turn of the century in Russian literature or, from the point of view of the direction, the borderline character of Gogol's work, his so-called pre-realistic character ^[3], and has no force when the "impulses" of the phase of active reaction to someone else's and his borrowing based on tradition native literature is gradually disappearing and the literary fact is perceived as commonplace. The key points of development, rather than the development itself as a whole, are the area of pre-post effect, and a preliminary view of the literary historian, in our opinion, is always necessary. Despite some semantic and customary difficulties of the term, if used correctly, it will have a happy fate as a tool that cannot be dispensed with in the synthesis of literary disciplines within the framework of solving global problems — and not only within the framework of Slavic studies, to which its author devoted himself.