Humberto Eco’s Intertext Lessons. Part 1
In the article it is said about the problem of intention / unwittingness of citing in the art text; the problem is considered in connection with the concept of «the death of the author» which is understood as an approach to a text research without addressing the writer’s biography and other facts, which are outside the text. Unique material for studying the problem of intention / unwittingness of references are Humberto Eco’s works, who is an outstanding writer and at the same time a scientist-semiotics, a researcher of the text. In a number of scientific, popular scientific and publicistic works H. Eco concerns cases of existence of intertextual communications in his own novels. According to his words, some of these communications are included into texts intentionally, others have appeared there accidentally. Eco offers a scheme of impacts made on the writer’s works not only by his predecessors, but also with such factors as «the world encyclopedia» (or «tradition») and a spirit of the age («present»). In the present article this scheme is used to consider two cases of intertextuality in Eco’s novel «The Name of the Rose» and three cases of alleged influence of Eco’s novels on works by modern Russian writers. In these three cases references seem to be quite conscious, however works by the Russian authors are very far from pretexts. The Italian writer and his Russian colleagues fill an invariant with different contents, and this distinction seems to be more interesting for studying, than similarity. In the first part of the article is considered the scheme of influences offered by H. Eco, which is applied to two facts: numerous coincidence of the subject courses of the detective novel by Robert Van Gulik «The Monastery with Ghosts» (1961) with Eco’s novel «The Name of the Rose» (1980) and to some similarity of the main hero of «The Name of the Rose» (Guglielmo de Baskerville) with one of characters of the fantastic novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky «Monday Begins on Saturday» (1965). In both cases there are no proofs of direct influence, however, it is more interesting the facts of coincidence to the researcher. Further references of Elena Kostyukovich’s novel «Tsvinger» with Humberto Eco novel «Zero Number» are considered.