Authorial Subtitles as a Source for Studying Poetics of Genres (Stories About Peasants in 19th Сentury Russia)

The article addresses the issue of studying the evolution and poetics of literary genres through the lens of such a rarely utilized source as genre subtitles. In this context, genre is understood as a communicative act by the author, who selects a strategy for publishing his or her text and entering the literary field. From this perspective, the genre subtitle serves as an interpretative framework for potential readers. The article demonstrates that genre subtitles can serve as a relevant source for examining the poetics of a genre, as they act as indicators of its formation, popularity, and “automatization.” The focus of the study is the genre of peasant stories (or, as it was termed in the 19th century, ‘stories from peasant life’) over the course of its century-long existence (1772 to 1872). By compiling a dataset of metadata from 382 works about peasants (including author, title, subtitle, year of publication, place of publication, and type of narration), the author traces the key stages in the evolution of the genre and, in particular, trends in the use of various types of subtitles by 120 writers. After a long period of sporadic appearance of genre subtitles in peasant stories, the genre consolidates and flourishes in the 1840s — 1860s, as evidenced by a significant increase in the number of subtitles containing stable formulas with genre names (‘tale’, ‘story’, ‘sketch’) and adjectives like “common folk” or “peasant” (e.g., “a tale from common folk life).” The analysis of individual publication strategies of 120 writers reveals a key pattern: those authors who initially published texts about peasants in periodicals on a regular basis and later compiled them into a cycle that included a genre definition (such as Ivan Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter” or Vladimir Dal’s “Pictures from Russian Life”) have been remembered in the history of Russian literature as masters of the genre. In contrast, writers who took the opposite approach and published an entire cycle of “Stories from Folk Life” at once did not achieve the same level of recognition.