“Don’t correct me, I’m not wrong”: The error code in Sasha Sokolov’s “A School for Fools”

About the authors:

Galina I. Danilina, Dr. Sci. (Philol.), Associate Professor, Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, University of Tyumen, Tyumen, Russia; g.i.danilina@utmn.ru, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0100-0948

Kseniya A. Grinyakina, Postgraduate Student (Russian Literature and the Literatures of the Peoples of the Russian Federation) of the Department of Linguistics and Literature, University of Tyumen, Tyumen, Russia

stud0000222851@study.utmn.ru, https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9335-945X

Abstract:

The text of Sasha Sokolov’s novel A School for Fools (1976) incorporates over one hundred instances of violations of “school” rules of the Russian language. The aim of this study, which constitutes its novelty, is to investigate this feature of the novel’s discourse through the lens of the school narrative. The methodological foundation of the research is based on the concept of psychopathologies as society’s investment in postmodern philosophy (M. Foucault, G. Deleuze); and code as a text-generating principle (R. Barthes). The logic of the analysis is determined by the structure of the school narrative in the novel. Cases of rule violations are systematized according to the rules for evaluating school written assignments; their typological and linguistic-stylistic classification is provided. The study demonstrates that these “errors” mark the development of the narrator-hero as a creative personality; the “error code” captures the stages of this process. As a result, the novel’s concept of a creative personality, based on the hero’s self-cultivation, is presented: the creation of one’s own linguistic worldview in opposition to a non-creative social environment.

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