Staf Irina Karlovna – Candidate in Philology, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for World Literature RAS; ORCID: 0000-0003-3975-6617
The article deals with the transformation of the apothegm genre in Etienne Tabourot’s Bigarrures (1585). In contrast to the humanist facetia, the comic effect of Tabourot’s short sayings is based not on wit, but on absurdity and violation of logical connections. Relying on the tradition established by Erasmus’s Apothegms and their reception in sixteenth-century French culture, the writer mocks bookish scholarship and at the same time parodies, in the spirit of Rabelais, the “natural” national rhetoric, which was embodied and substantiated in Montaigne’s Essais.
France; Renaissance; apothegm; bigarrure; short narrative; compilation.