Article

Name: The Originality of the Comic in the Prose of Venedict Marth

Authors: E. A. Denisova

Institute of Philology SB RAS, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section The Plot in the System of Cultural Universals: Bunin, East and West of the Russian Emigration

Abstract:

Venedikt Mart is the pseudonym of the poet and writer Venedikt Nikolaevich Matveev (1895–1937). He was born and lived in Vladivostok until 1920, where he published his poems in local newspapers and magazines, published his first collections in the printing house of his father, who was a writer and local historian Nikolai Amursky (Nikolai Petrovich Matveev), (1865–1941). Venedict Mart became famous for his futuristic poems and translations of Japa- nese and Chinese poetry.

The collection “At the Love Crossroads of Fads” (1922) is a clear mockery of precision culture. The reference to the long-gone culture of past centuries is comical in that V. Marth’s pretentiousness of vocabulary and immoderate hyperbolism of short stories is stronger than in any French novel created by a writer-precision. The heroes’ love explanations take an unexpected turn, in which romantic stories are resolved in a comic manner.

In June 1917, in St. Petersburg on Krestovsky Island, V. Mart wrote the book “Emerald Worms”. In one of the main refrains of the text: “You smile and Your smile will remain here on Earth – in March to enchant the autumn people...”, the author’s self-irony is noticeable, since in the book “You” means “Genius of the Cosmos” who reaches Immortality – this means that his works live forever. In the phrase “You stay in March,” the author cleverly uses the fact that his pseudonym coincides with the name of the month. This game with the reader is a characteristic feature of the entire work of the writer.

In V. Mart’s prose of the late 1920s – early 1930s, an educational orientation and adherence to the “state order” are visible. The 1932 story “Dere – a Water Wedding” combines several artistic directions. Some fragments of the text are stylized like a fairy tale story. V. Mart confronts this artistic direction with the literature of fact, thereby creating a comic effect through which the author expresses the catastrophic nature of the process of loss of self-identification of a small people under the influence of the “new way of life”.

In the collection “At the Love Crossroads of Fads” creates a comic effect through sheer mockery of precision culture. Here V. Mart uses fabulous motives, which he will extensively use in his prose. In the book “Emerald Worms” absurdity and the author’s self-irony are the main methods of the comic. Since the end of the 1920s, being under the supervision of the police and squeezed by the censorship framework from the explicit forms of the comic, V. Mart turns to hidden irony, which is read more at the stylistic level, for example, a deliberate combination of literary genres far from each other in one work.

Keywords: V. March, comic, irony, rare book, Far East

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