THE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHISPS IN MIKHAIL SHISHKIN’S ESSAYS ABOUT WRITERS

Abstract

The article analyses the intersubjective relationships displayed in Mikhail Shiskhin’s essays concerned with other writers, such as Robert Walser, James Joyce, and Vladimir Sharov. The author demonstrates that the narrator’s statements are intersubjective, which is supported by both the system of the transmitting-receiving activity of the subject and the area of the statements’ object. Shishkin pays special attention to Walser. According to Shishkin, the process of becoming a writer is achieved through deprivation, alienation, and being misunderstood, as well as, most importantly, by experiencing the euphory of writing and acceptance of asthenic inability to write. A closer look at the poetics of the essays lets us explore elaborately intertwined series of motifs and repetitions, which appear on the text’s various levels. Rhetorical features, in particular anaphora, geminatio, and anadiplosis, are discussed in the present article most thoroughly. The specific use of repletion allows Shishkin to achieve a convincing dynamic description of Walser’s contradictory impulses in life and writing.