Artistic experiments in the A.S. Pushkin`s prose: unreliable narration

The article is devoted to the analysis of the unreliability of the narrator in the finished and unfinished works of A.S. Pushkin. The purpose of the article is to show that the unreliability of the narrator is becoming one of the basic principles of Pushkin’s prose. Based on the material of "The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin", "A Novel in Letters", and the excerpts "My fate is decided. I’m getting married..." and "The History of the Village of Goryukhina", the following features of the unreliable narrator are explored: inconsistency and limited evidence, naivety, and emphasized fictionality. The study shows that Pushkin opens up the possibilities of the unreliable narrator: multilevel narrative organization, contradictory discourses, paratextuality as a marker of unreliability, and modeling of "possible" plots. The main discovery of A. S. Pushkin is a probabilistic picture of the world of an unreliable narrator. The unreliability of the narrator is also indicated by silence regarding referential events ("A Novel in Letters") and transformations of communicative events (the naivety of Ivan Petrovich Belkin, the bias of the narrator of "My fate is decided. I’m getting married..."). The probabilistic picture of the world of the unreliable narrator becomes an artistic discovery of A. S. Pushkin.