SHOCK AND ROUTINE AS MODES OF REALIST WRITING: TOWARDS A HISTORICAL NARRATOLOGY OF THE RUSSIAN CLASSICAL NOVEL
Shock and routine as categories of everyday experience have long been a subject of refl ection in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Th e philosophy of shock refers to the category of the sublime, which goes back to Burke and Kant and has been at the centre of theoretical refl ection in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Routine has also been of great interest to thinkers, suffi ce it to mention Durkheim, Simmel and Heidegger. For a theory of literature, these concepts (which are at the same time living experiences and fi gures of our imaginary) are important because they concentrate in a certain way the narratological categories of eventuality and processuality, discreteness and continuity, singularity and iterativity. Moreover, proceeding from the contemporary theoretical ideas about the fundamental relationship and rupture between shock and routine as a key characteristic of modern culture, it seems possible to look at this basic opposition as an essential dynamic model of the literary imaginary of the modern era. In particular, one can explore the historical forms of literary narrative in the light of the changing configuration of the relationship between these categories. Th e present paper off ers a “dialectical” view of the problem of correlation between shock and routine as a modus operandi of the realistic narrative, which, according to some versions, is structured around a turning mental event; according to others, it is based on the elaboration of the smallest elements of depicted reality, creating the eff ect of the universal connection of things and the eventless continuity of life. Using several examples from contemporary literary and art theory and literary cases proper (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), we show how the Romantic opposition of shock and routine is transformed within the realist paradigm.