GENRE AND STYLE INNOVATION OF THE NOVEL "SOLARIS" BY STANISLAVA LEMA

Abstract

The novel "Solaris" occupies a key place in the creative biography of S. Lem. Starting with this work, the writer decisively departs from the utopian projects of the future, which at that time were spread in the most diverse versions. He also resolutely rejects the "adventure" and "technological" variants of the SF fiction. His attention is focused on the classic form of the novel with the minimum necessary technical conventions of depicting life in the future. Among other things, a new vector of literary searches required close attention to the development of various forms and means of psychologism, which revealed additional facets of Lem's talent. At the same time, it was not an ordinary return to the classics. Lem does not simply move from an impersonal form of narrative to an "I-narrative" delving into the character's self-reflection, – he forms the strategy of an «unreliable» narrator with numerous fields of uncertainty and inexplicability. So he actually anticipates the concepts of narrative discourse (J.F. Lyotard, P. Ricœur) and the ideas of receptive poetics and aesthetics (W. Iser, H. R. Jauss). The strategies presented in «Solaris» were not completely new to world literature, but for the science fiction it was a truly innovative phenomenon. From today’s height «Solaris» looks like an «untimely» novel that did not fit into the main trends in the development of modern science fiction. The dominants of the content and poetics of «Solaris» give reasons to consider the work is a futuristic existential novel.