The poetics of contemporary women’s military prose in historical dynamics: traditions of “lieutenant prose” and their transformation (based on the works of A. Dolgareva, E. Zalesskaya, and I. Bugrysheva)

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to identify the genre-stylistic and subject-narrative transformations that contemporary women’s war prose undergoes at the turn of the 21st century. Drawing on a comparative analysis of poetic systems and a historical-literary retrospective, the authors examine works by A. Dolgareva, E. Zalesskaya, and I. Bugrysheva, situating them within the context of continuity with the “lieutenant prose” of the second half of the 20th century. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that, for the first time, it traces how the category of corporeality represented through tactile experience becomes a structure-forming dominant of women’s war narrative, transforming the architectonic forms of the tragic and adapting them to the conditions of digital communication. The obtained results showed that whereas in classical “lieutenant prose” the author and the hero belong to the same frontline generation, united by a shared war experience, contemporary women’s narrative is built on fundamentally different grounds. Here the author is a female volunteer, medic, or poet. The hero is a soldier, a patient, or a recipient of assistance. Their positions prove to be separated. Emerging at the intersection of documentary journalism, personal diary, and volunteer testimony, this type of narration creates a distinct subject structure uncharacteristic of the “lieutenant” tradition. The paper also substantiates the genetic link between contemporary women’s war prose and the activities of women war correspondents of World War II (in particular, N. Bode) and with the “archival turn” in the humanities, actualized by projects of digital archiving of personal documents (“Prozhito”).