Abstract

Attentive readers of Bakhtin are familiar with the importance he attributed to “semiliterary” or folkloristic genres and art works. Bakhtin came to the interesting conclusion that emerging and historically representative, types of literary works often build from semi-literary blocks. These blocks may be fragmented and incomplete, purely raw materials from the aesthetic viewpoint. Nonetheless, they are harbingers of the emergence of a significant literary form. This is the case with Red Square, apparently a thriller written by two Soviet defectors, Edward Topol and Fridrikh Neznasky, in reality a significant, albeit semi-literary, historical novel in the style of Walter Scott. All constituents analyzed by Lukács in his famous description of Scott's historical novels are present