Lecture
There are groups of works where non-authorial speech dominates completely. Such are stylizations, which deliberately and overtly imitate the features and properties of some folk or literary style. We may recall Lermontov's «The Song of <„.> the Merchant Kalashnikov», the ballads of A.K. Tolstoy, and the novella «The Fiery Angel» by V.Ya. Bryusov, oriented toward the style of Western European medieval prose.
Skaz, which likewise operates with non-authorial speech, is, unlike stylizations and parodies, oriented toward oral, everyday, colloquial speech. Here we have «an imitation of "live" conversation, being born, as it were, this very minute, here and now, at the moment of its perception»2. Most importantly, skaz, far more than traditional forms of written narration, fixes our attention on the bearer of speech — the narrator, bringing to the fore his figure, his voice, and his characteristic vocabulary and phraseology. «The principle of skaz demands,» noted B.M. Eikhenbaum, «that the narrator's speech be colored not only by intonational-syntactic but also by lexical shades»3. Examples of skaz — N.V. Gogol's «Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka», much of the prose of V.I. Dal and N.S. Leskov.
SKAZ — a form of presenting folk works that is specific in its intonation and style; hence by skaz is meant that manner of presentation in literary works which reproduces the speech of works of oral literature, and, in a broader sense — oral speech in general and even unusual forms of written speech.
The most widespread forms of skaz are: a) imitation of the fairy-tale, bylina, and song mode. Compare: «Beyond the Volga in the forests, in the Black Ramen, there lived a peasant, a rich muzhik. That peasant had a daughter growing up. The daughter grew, filling out with beauty» (Melnikov-Pechersky, «In the Forests» — fairy-tale skaz); b) imitation of local and professional peasant dialects: «He got sick to death of it, he was angry as a fierce serpent; but every evening he still went to see Prokudin. The elders started measuring out the hemp seed, and Prokudin measured out some five cartloads» (Leskov, «The Life of a Peasant Woman»); c) imitation of the vernacular and professional dialects of the urban population, chiefly those groups of it that do not fully command the literary language: «I thank him and say that I have no desires at all and cannot think of any, except one — if it be his grace's will, to tell me...» (Leskov, «The Darner»); d) imitation of archaic and unusual forms of written speech: «And in such a peaceable spirit, as I have described to you, we lived for almost three years. Everything prospered for us, successes poured upon us as if from Amalthea's horn, when suddenly we beheld that among us were two vessels chosen by God for our chastisement» (Leskov, «The Sealed Angel» — skaz of Old Russian didactic books).
As is clear from the examples given, the character of skaz is achieved in written speech through the selection of vocabulary of various kinds of oral speech (and in the last example given — archaic vocabulary, foreign to the modern literary language) and specific forms of syntax and morphology, permissible only in oral speech (or in ancient writing): imitations of folk genres are characterized, for example, by rhythmization, a recitative or melodic mode, the transfer into written speech of figures typical of folklore; imitations of the vernacular — by the introduction of a significant number of dialectisms, the violation of the grammatical structure of written speech — incomplete sentences, their lack of agreement, an abundance of exclamatory and interrogative constructions.
In rare cases skaz is sustained throughout the entire work: more often the author interweaves it with ordinary literary narration, motivating this by the need to shorten the account.
The introduction of skaz forms is usually motivated by authorial intent, characterizing the situation and the narrator (compare the construction of most of Leskov's novellas — «The Amazon», «Nocturnal Vigils», «The Enchanted Wanderer», «The Toupee Artist», etc. Compare «Framing»). Another very common form of introducing skaz is the monological character of the narration — Ich-Erzählung, the diary, the letter (compare the construction of Dostoevsky's novels and novellas — «Notes from Underground», «Demons», etc.). Sometimes the introduction of skaz characterizes the experiences and train of thought of one of the characters. Compare: «Mother Manefa stands in the prayer room before the icons, weeping bitter, burning tears... The vain, sinful world again spoke into Manefa's inner ear» — there follows a skaz about a rich muzhik and his beautiful daughter as an account of the heroine's memories (Melnikov-Pechersky, «In the Forests»). Here the introduction of skaz is one instance of so-called «free indirect discourse» (style indirect libre) — a characterization of a character's thoughts presented on the author's behalf.
Forms of skaz become truly artistic when the entire content of the work is presented from the angle that is characteristic of and possible for the imagined narrator; such are the images that emerge from skaz — the simple-hearted, impoverished landowner Belkin, the talkative Ukrainian beekeeper Rudy Panko, the curious "progressive" — the inhabitant of Dostoevsky's provincial little towns, the Petersburg harridans — hangers-on and secondhand dealers, the admirers of "Father John of Kronstadt" in Leskov, and so on and so forth.
Permitted in the literary styles of classicism only in direct speech to characterize comic characters, skaz is widely used in the literary styles of romanticism (with a predominance of folkloric and Old Russian written skaz, as well as peasant skaz) and of nineteenth-century realism (the inclusion of everyday urban vernacular and the broad use of regional peasant dialects in regional literature). In contemporary Soviet literature, forms of skaz achieve, on the one hand, greater refinement (the skaz of Babel, Tynianov, Sholokhov, and many others), but on the other hand they sometimes appear insufficiently justified, taking on the character of an aimless destruction of the norms of the literary language and provoking protest from the best masters of the word (M. Gorky's statements against the corruption of the literary language in 1934).
Skaz narration (skaz) is conducted in a manner sharply different from the author's own and is oriented toward forms of oral speech. Skaz became widespread in nineteenth-century Russian literature, beginning in the 1830s. For example, in Pushkin's slightly parodic «Belkin's Tales», a sympathetically ironic characterization is given not only of the characters but of the narrators as well. Gogol and Leskov made use of a similar form of narration. Skaz allows writers to capture various types of verbal thinking more freely and broadly, and to resort to parody. It is built in the order of speaking, oriented toward the contemporary living monological speech of the narrator, sharply different from the author's own, a narrator who has emerged from some milieu exotic to the reader (everyday, national, folk). Skaz makes wide use of vernacular speech, dialectisms, and also professional speech. Two forms of skaz are the most widespread: the first, conducted in the first person of a quite definite narrator. It is especially close to the living intonation of oral speech. The second form dispenses with the introduction of a real narrator. Problems of the author: recourse to skaz is most often connected with writers' striving to break the established conservative literary tradition, to bring onto the stage a new hero and new material from life. (The tales of Bazhov.)
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