The material world in Russian popular prose of the second half of the 18th century (Mikhail Chulkov, Matvey Komarov)

The aim of the study is to reconstruct the anthropological concept of the genre by typologizing the object details in Russian examples of the picaresque novel of the 1770s, taking into account their significance in shaping the characters’ worldview, outlook, and the possibilities of addressing their inner, mental state, conditioned by external circumstances. The article examines the object-everyday details in the novels “The Comely Cook” by M. D. Chulkov and “Vanka Kain” by M. Komarov. Within the framework of the basic genre model of the picaresque novel, the principles of constructing the object-everyday level in the text are revealed, its significance for the unfolding of the plot and the formation of character images is shown. The study is original in that it is the first one to present the concept of man in the Russian picaresque novel of the 1770s, which is revealed in the system of depicting the object world. A typology of object-everyday details is proposed, from the most structurally simple level of naming to a holistic detailed description, saturated with emotional content and characterizing the inner state of the characters. As a result of the study, it was established that the object details in the picaresque novel of the second third of the 18th century represented a dynamically developing area of the author’s comprehension of the culture of everyday life and the design of a strategy of dialogue with the reader who could recognize in the details of the everyday background the vital basis of the novel narrative. This contributed to the growth of popularity, and subsequently, at the end of the 18th century, theoretical recognition of the novel genre and its expressive possibilities.