Features of the author's prose about the First World War

This article examines the author's prose about the First World War by two famous European writers (and participants in the war) – the Briton Robert Graves ("I'm Sorry, goodbye to all this", 1929) and the German Ludwig Renn ("The War", 1928). The subject of the study is the genre features of the works, some features of which can be attributed to both autobiography and fiction. Special attention is paid to two poetological categories: the role of the protagonist and the chronotope. Ambivalence of the genre characteristics of the works themselves, since, on the one hand, they are documentary, and on the other – fictitious. Documentality or factuality is set by the specific biography of the self-revealing "I" of the author. Fictionality grows out of the absolute possession of the speech structure of the work, the author, the subject and the object of the narrative. Comparative historical and comparative typological methods made it possible to consider literary interactions, parallels, similarities, as well as borrowings and mutual influences of literatures. The typological method made it possible to consider the similarities and differences in literary phenomena by clarifying the degree of similarities and differences in cultural life. The main conclusions of the study are that the Briton Robert Graves changed "I'm sorry, goodbye to all that" into a documentary narrative, and Renn, on the contrary, transformed diary entries into fiction (the novel "War"). The aim of both authors, as Renn himself pointed out, was to show the war as it really is. The scientific novelty of the work is as follows: it was revealed that if the spatial and temporal pointers coincide, then nevertheless space and time in autobiographical texts do not coincide with the real one, since the recalled chronotope is not perceptual, i.e. specifically given, it has the character of a reconstructed in the memory of the author-the subject-protagonist. That is why we are talking about the synthesis of genres in the works of R. Graves and L. Renn, which accumulated features of both autobiography and fiction.

Robert Graves, Lidwig Renn, First world war, genre, main character, poetic space, poetic time, narrator, biography, fiction