Fear in Vladimir Odoevsky's Short Story ‘The Mockery of the Corpse’ in Connection with the Features of Narrative Modalities

The choice of fear as a subject of study is due to its system-forming role in the works of Romantics. Fear as a philosophical and aesthetic category marks the collision of the material with the spiritual, and therefore is found at all levels of a literary work. The article focuses on the functioning of fear as an emotion transmitted by various communicative instances of the short story. The purpose of the study is to determine how the narrative structure of a literary text allows the author to influence the reader and, in particular, to convey the emotion of fear. The study employed analytical, structural, motif-imagery, classification, and comparative methods. The research is based on V. Schmid's theory of the subjective structure of narrative, V. I. Tyupa's ideas about narrative strategies and their role in the synchronic and diachronic study of literature, and B. A. Uspensky's developments in the field of poetics of composition. The study has revealed the features of the functioning of fear at the narrative levels of the characters, narrators, and the abstract author, which allows us to make assumptions about the optimal position of the addressee for the perception of the story. It has been found that fear in the artistic world of Vladimir Odoevsky is created through the construction of an internally consistent picture of the world convincing of the irresistible power of the material. Strategies for creating this effect vary. In the first part, the narrator is positioned as omniscient, omnipresent, intrinsic in relation to the characters and openly entering into a controversy over values with them. In the second part, the narrator manifests himself to a lesser extent, while the ideological position is expressed by means of combining facts, replicas, as well as by compositional and motif correlation with the first part of the story.