Humanities & Social Sciences 7 (2015 8) 1479-1485 ~ ~ ~ УДК 821.133.1.0 The Rhetoric of Proust’s Early Aesthetic Manifestos Natalya O. Laskina* Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University 28 Vilyuiskaya Str., Novosibirsk, 630126, Russia Received 24.01.2015, received in revised form 21.03.2015, accepted 26.04.2015 Marcel Proust’s non-fi ction heritage includes several texts that are usually seen as the future novelist’s attempts to formulate his views on the nature of art and to clarify his place in the literary life of the time. <...> This article examines Proust’s most accomplished anti-symbolist manifesto, “Contre l’Obscuritй”, and three fragments describing different aspects of the creative experience. <...> The purpose of this research is to investigate the rhetorical aspects of Proust’s refl ection on the creative process and to establish the pragmatics of this sort of writing in the context of the novelist’s formation. <...> While tracing the rhetoric strategies Proust uses to distance himself from the artistic trends of his own generation, the article proposes to read these early drafts not only as a theory of art but also as a manifestation of the author’s doubts and ambitions regarding his literary project. <...> As proved in this article, Proust in his debuts is most original and most modernist not when he is trying to imitate art theorists or critics but when he is touching upon the struggles of a young author (fear to lose inspiration or to be unable to fi nish the major work, problems of fi nding literary identity, relationship with the readers). <...> In the non-fi ction heritage of Marcel Proust a special place is occupied by several texts written in the 1890’s and dedicated to abstract refl ection about the nature of creativity, on the state of literature and art problems. <...> In the Russian literature the works of A.N. Taganov are devoted to this subject, and we share his point of view, according to which “the artistic system of Proust has initially “focusing” character. <...> Emerging at the intersection traditions, rationalist and irrational it tendencies, incorporates a variety of manifestations of literary life, and then distinctively “breaks” them giving them a new direction” (Taganov, 1993, 27). <...> A.N. Taganov also considers the conditions of formation of the Proust <...>