“Limit to the bloody field”: retribution in the narrative of A. Ivanov “Pitchfork”

The research investigates the genre-forming function of the motive of retribution in the documentary and journalistic narrative of A.V. Ivanov “Pitchfork”. The relevance of the study is due to the attention of modern literary criticism to the historiosophical and social and political problems in Russian prose, the need to study the works of modern literature in its most striking manifestations. The purpose of this work is to try to determine the specificity of the main “bearing constructs” of the narrative of A. Ivanov “Pitchfork” in the aspect of the dominant motives of the work. The leading way to achieve this goal is the comparative and historical method, supplemented by comparative and typological, intertextual and mythopoetic approaches to the work of literature. As a result of the analysis, it was found that in the documentary and journalistic narrative of A. Ivanov “Pitchfork” the main genre-forming motive of the work, organizing its entire structure from the title to the “stories” of the main and secondary actors, is the retribution motive, derived from it and related motives, originally interpreted by the author. It is concluded that the motive of metaphysical, transcendental retribution “to all for everything” reproduced and transformed by Ivanov the artist, despite the extreme generality of this motive, helps the writer to comprehend and convey the contradictory complexity of historical events and historical characters involved in it. The field of application of the work results are researches on the latest literature, teaching literature in higher and secondary schools.