Commentary Ad Infinitum in Andrej Bitov's Unified Narrative

This article explores Andrei Bitov's narrative techniques, every inquiry into which reveals again and again what a pivotal role the discourse of literary commentary plays in his prose. Within this discourse, the more or less traditional distinction between a professional critic's commentary about a creative text written by some author (in other words, critical commentary) and a commentary by the author regarding his own text (in other words, literary comments), appears to be deliberately and at times totally blurred by Bitov, in whose writings fictional and critical aspects of literature tend to merge.