Author and Narrator in the History of Russian Literature

The correlation between the author and narrator figures is considered not only theoretically, but in the diachronic aspect for the first time, as historically changed from Karamzin to Vodolazkin. The syncretism of these narrative instances in Karamzin’s prose was replaced by their radical segregation by Pushkin in playing forms of “image of the author” or the unreliable narrator (like Belkin), that leads to the emergence of an implicit authorial instance. The Great Russian classics (with the exception of “War and Peace”) refuse the “image of the author”, gives to the implicit authorship the status of a representation of the being truth. The crisis of classical authorship at the turn of the 19 th and 20 th centuries gives rise to various modifications in symbolism, in “ornamental” prose, in socialist realism, in postmodernism. The article also deals with the issue of creative reconstruction of the classical opposition in the works by Bulgakov, Pasternak, during The Thaw in 1960s and in modern Russian prose.