Goethe’s voice in the novel of Andrei Nikolev “Beyond Tula”

Abstract

The paper examines the polygenetic nature of images and motives in the novel by Andrei Nikolev (Egunov), with particular attention on the “Faustian code”, which allows one to comprehend the European literary tradition. The writer is known to have been exceptionally passionate about Goethe’s works. He was close to the morphology of Goethe’s culture that drew the organizing world principle from the development of biological forms. Goethe’s ideas about the relationship between the cellular tissue of organisms and the expressive tissue of culture were a text-forming force in Egunov’s creativity. Goethe’s context covers a wide range of meanings: from the eschatological category of the transformation of phenomena and the world’s transformation to the farce, for example, in the story about the Hamelin piper. Nikolev’s novel has two realities overlapped without being autonomous and separate. Against the backdrop of the flickering plot of “Faust,” a plot twist appears: instead of a bet and a contract, one can see a convergence of the themes of Faust and Mephistopheles. Perception is interpreted as a respiratory problem. The narration is structured in such a way as to restrain the activity of themes associated with the image of the “fist” (Faust), transcending them with one meaning: creativity as the natural state of man. The search for the ultimate universal representation of the “poetic person” serves as the original meaning for the shape of events acquired in the novel. The mode of being that defines the poet possesses no categories of gender.