The structure of famous person’s literary portrait in P.D. Boborykin’s memoir trilogy

Popova Tamara Pavlovna

The purpose of the paper is to define the specifications of the important structural element in the memoir trilogy by Petr Dmitrievich Boborykin - a popular Russian novelist and journalist in late 19-th – early 20-th century. The trilogy consists 3 books: “Eternal City” (About Rome)¬¬¬, “Capitals of the World” (About Paris and London) and “During Half-Century” (About Russia). For analysis, we selected the description of people from different countries and professional spheres – E.Littré and N.A. Nekrasov. The result is a text-based analysis, which reveals some permanent structural features of both portraits. As the main purpose of author’s writings was the most detailed description, it seems that he follows the description plan consisting of 18 points. Due to various reasons, the plan isn’t possible to get implemented in every case, but it’s still being stable because of the portrait standardization principle – using the various readers’ very own worldview on people from another countries, estates and historical periods. The result is a matrix which allows author to represent every famous person – sometimes even describing in the text body why one or another element is absent. The existence of the matrix itself links us to the memoirist’s conscious orientation towards mass audience for more keeping in memory.

Keywords:literary portrait, P.D. Boborykin, literary portrait genre typology, matrix, mass audience.