Rusanova Marfa Maksimovna – graduate student of the Department of History of Russian Literature of St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg State University
Diaries authors of the revolutionary period have compared the surrounding socio-political reality with fiction prose. The pieces of art in the similar context had appeared before the Russian revolutions of 1917 in literary and political discussions but not in readers’ diaries mainly. On the material of the novel reception The Possessed by F. Dostoevsky the article analyzes the ways of introducing literary reminiscences in the revolutionary time in relation to the previous tradition. Analysis of reminiscences tropological structure bases on the main principles of linguistics and structuralist poetics. It turns out that before 1917 recipients had seen the novel characters as images and types; they perceived demonic motives as a metaphor mainly. In the revolutionary time comparisons of characters with the diarists’ contemporaries based on metonymic connections; realized metaphors predominated in the representations of demonicity. Perhaps, despite the change of the perception of the reality that is in the rapprochement of fiction and modernity, recipients perceived the environment in the categories of the same rhetorical tradition.
literature tropes; metaphor; metonymy; diaries of the revolutionary era; ego-documents.