THE MOTIF OF “SOMEONE ELSE’S MANUSCRIPT” IN YURI POLYAKOV’S NOVEL “THE KID IN MILK” AS AN ELEMENT OF INTERTEXT DIALOGUE

Abstract

Yuri Polyakov’s novel “The Kid in Milk” includes a large number of intertextual elements that refer to various works of Russian and world literature. This study presents an analysis of the motif of “someone else’s manuscript”: in the afterword, the author of the novel points to the allegedly accidental acquisition of the manuscript and its publication under his own name with a change of proper names. This motif has an extensive history in Russian literature: it was used by A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov, M.A. Bulgakov. A comparative analysis of the texts of the above-mentioned authors and the text of Yuri Polyakov’s novel revealed some constants of this motif, including the death of the author, the change of proper names, and the accidental discovery of the manuscript. Entering into an intertextual dialogue with the classics, Polyakov introduces a number of original solutions to the motif of “someone else’s manuscript”, which include the anonymity of the author and the compositional placement of information about the history of the text not at the beginning, but at the end of the novel. The functions of both reproduced and original elements of the motif are revealed, and their role in the intertextual layer of the novel is shown.