Путеводитель как форма современной русской транскультурной прозы: прагматика и поэтика

ABSTRACT This article explores the use of the guidebook as a narrative form in the work of a number of “displaced” Russian authors (Joseph Brodsky, Andreï Makine, Michail Šiškin). In literary fiction, the guidebook is a documentary-literary hybrid inscribed into the wider frame of postmodernism. It is a fusion of a document with its informative function, autobiography and historiosophic essay. Literary works written in this form share some features: they all display a shift in focus from space to time, putting strong emphasis on history and presenting a “panoramic” or “mosaic” picture of it. This panoramic view increases the distance to the spatial environments seen from afar and – as in Brodsky’s case – undermines the very spatial reality. The paper argues that the use of the guidebook as a narrative form by transcultural authors makes transcultural writing itself a fusion of the pragmatic and the aesthetic, and that its specificity lies exactly in this blend.