Features of functioning of historical discourse in non-historical prose by Evgeny Vodolazkin

Abstract

The works of E. Vodolazkin, who invariably refers to the historical past in his works, nevertheless defining his prose as “unhistorical”, allow us to raise the question of their specifics with regard to historical discourse functioning. Our analysis is based on E. Vodolazkin’s novels of the 2000s, starting with “Solovyov and Larionov” and up to the latest one – “Chagin”. The aim of the analysis is to consider the writer’s prose as an integral artistic system, which is based on his religious and moral concepts. It is established that in the “big” and “small” history, Vodolazkin is interested in the things that tend to be re-peated, that are somehow connected with the moral formation of a personality. The article explores the features of the embodiment of the idea characteristic for the writer: the priority of personal history over universal history, since only the former possesses a spiritual and moral purpose. We reveal the forms of artistic refraction of the spiral-shaped Christian model of time-eternity, formed in the Middle Ages, in Vodolazkin’s prose. From this perspective, we analyze the cross-cutting motifs, the principle of “similarities”, which organizes the system of images and determines the nature of intertextual connections, and the originality of the plot structure of his novels. The article proves that in the novels of Vodolazkin, the world picture is based on the combination of a “view from above”, which makes it possible to understand what is eternal and what is temporary, and a “close-up”, presenting simple phenomena of the earthly world in a stereoscopic image reminding of the eternal. The shift of the emphasis on the details of private existence, the importance of sensory perception of the world, most vividly embodied in the chapters devoted to childhood and found in all the writer’s novels, allows us to conclude that the features of the historical discourse functioning in Vodolazkin’s artistic system are determined by his appeal, so to speak on a new spiral turn, not only to the medieval concepts of time, but also to the experience of sentimentalism.