Slavic metafiction: Witold Gombrowicz's 'Ferdydurke', Mikhail Bulgakov's 'Master i Margarita', and Vaclav Rezac's 'Rozhrani'

There exist many studies of metafiction: a narrative mode characterized by the simultaneous presentation of fictional worlds with a description of the procedures of their organization. Most of the studies, however, do not provide a coherent theory of metafiction, nor do they present a history of its development; moreover, Slavic material has so far received very little attention. The present thesis is an attempt to remedy this omission. It begins by relating various definitions of metafiction to individual texts, and demonstrates that the structure of metafictional novels is a complex hierarchy of constituent devices and procedures. The main body of the thesis concentrates on a discussion of three Slavic novels: Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1937), Mikhail Bulgakov' s Master i Margarita (1940), and Vaclav Rezac's Rozhrani/ (1944).;Chapter I presents selected aspects of the development of metafiction using as illustrative material Don Quixote (1605-15), Tristram Shandy (1759-67), Jacques le fataliste (1755-84), Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), and At Swim-Two-Birds (1937). Chapters II-IV analyze the Slavic novels in terms of their metafictional nature. The chapter on Ferdydurke focuses on the distribution of information regarding the narrative act in its declarative, procedural, and abstracting aspects. Also, immanent structuring processes are analyzed. The impact of the latter on the semantic structure is given special consideration in the chapter on The Master and Margarita. The chapter on Rezac's novel further examines this intricate relationship between the context of a metafictional novel and its formal arrangements.;A major conclusion of the thesis is that the metafictional mode manifests a high-degree of structural complexity resulting in the semantization of formal components, frequent changes in levels and explicit formulation of procedural rules. The most important features of what constitutes a complex hierarchy include: the correlated development of components, isomorphic transformations of themes, nonlinearity of narrating, a high degree of internal coherence, and the principle of recursivity of metafictional and fictional components. It is further argued that the metafictional mode in all three novels finds its fullest realization on the structural level. Finally, it is argued that the simultaneous perception of all of the constituent layers is necessary for the reading of a metafictional novel.