The representation of revolution in V. Lavrov's novel "Gallows and Money, or The Mistake of Azef"

The subject of this study is the representation of socialist-revolutionary figures in Valentin Lavrov's novel "The Gallows and Money, or Azef's Mistake." Despite the designation of the genre as a detective story, the author seeks to ensure the plausibility of reproducing the past in order to establish an unusual interpretation of the image of the greatest revolutionary traitor in the history of the Russian Empire – Evno Azef – in the readers' consciousness. In this article, the text of the novel is compared with possible documentary sources that the author relied on when portraying the images of revolutionaries such as Y. F. Azef and S. V. Balmashov. Correspondences and differences between the artistic representation of these figures and the real historical figures are indicated. The techniques used by Lavrov in the process of creating his own narrative about the revolutionary underground in imperial Russia are identified. The main methods of research in this article are the comparative-historical method and the historical-genetic method. The novelty of this research is due to the fact that the specifics of the representation of the revolutionary movement in contemporary historical fiction remains underexplored, which typically plays a significant role in shaping and fixing social and historical consciousness. At the same time, Lavrov's artistic work, despite its popularity, has hardly fallen into the sights of researchers. The author of the article argues that theatricality represents one of the main categories of the poetics of Lavrov's novel. In the historical space of the novel, revolutionaries appear as actors playing predetermined roles in accordance with widely spread mythologized notions of heroism and martyrdom of revolutionaries. In constructing the novel, the writer often deviates from the genre convention of the detective. In the image of the main character, a conditional investigator of crimes, contradictory components coexist. From the above, it follows that Lavrov's novel exemplifies the blurring of the boundary between mass and "high" literature.

Valentin Lavrov, the scaffold and money, detective, Evno Azef, S. V. Balmashev, depiction of the revolution, theatricalization, historical fiction, historical-genetic method, comparative-historical method