The dynamic Character in the Y. N. Tynyanov’s Story “The Wax Person” (Notes on the Topic)

The article examines the phenomenon of the “dynamic character”, when the same details of the description of the body, appearance, behavior are found in the characterization of heroes, living and dead, historical figures and fictional characters, as well as picture of the world as a whole during the last days of the reign of Peter I. The “chains” of famous and common persons interconnected by plot situations and language games are considered. The use of the technique of combinatorial repetition of motives and metaphors with an indefinite “floating” reference provides problematization of not only the identification of a character deprived of the usual “certainty”, but there is an “effect of incomplete mastery of the meaning” of the entire text, where not only the character, but all levels of the story represent a dynamic construction, which gives rise to the effect of “defamiliarization” (the modernist version of the technique). The historical past is constructed as a fiction both in the author’s act of creating a story and in the act of reader’s reception, which is explained by A. Bergson’s theory of memory that had influenced the aesthetic views of Yu. N. Tynyanov.