The Shepherd and the Shepherdess: V. Р. Astafiev’s Modern Pastoral in the Context of Genre Traditions

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to consider the movement of literature through the genre metamorphoses as a category that transforms in its immutability. Consequently, the author’s task was to study the modifications of the genre of love idyll using the example of Modern Pastoral ву V. P. Astafiev’s (The Shepherd and the Shepherdess) in the context of works about love that had emerged in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This task is carried out using the example of the initial samples of the love idyll genre in prose, as well as a theoretical justification of the unity of love idyll and pastoral as its main type (M. M. Bakhtin), which make up a single line of genre tradition. The article demonstrates the productivity of genre splices, i. e. the initial actualization of the love idyll genre in combination with the novel (Daphnis and Chloe, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult) and the story (The Tale of Peter and Fevronia, The Shepherd and the Shepherdess). The correlation between the ancient pastoral and Astafiev’s Modern Pastoral was noted in literary studies, albeit poorly justified, while the implementation of the traditions of the love idyll set by the above-mentioned medieval models remained beyond the scope of research. The study tested the typological resemblance of genre models, their similarities in themes, plot, and imagery, which allowed to include characters in the range of enamoured couples that have largely determined the development of world literature. The article focused on the debated question of the validity of the writer’s definition: Modern Pastoral. As a result, the study tested the productivity of Astafiev’s update to the genre canon; the validity of the genre naming by the writer, with regard to the modification made by him.