7 July 2021
The lecture will be held in person at the Vladimir Nabokov Museum at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street
The only purpose of literary analysis has always been to grasp the Meaning of a literary text. Using all available means, the scholar is to work his or her way up to the Meaning, which is, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, is ‘a world view within the framework of space and time’. A literary work is both a ‘structure’ and a device. However, when the author’s ‘personal history’ makes the textual determinacy obvious, it is pertinent to consider it a ‘device’ on par with poetics. By the ‘personal history’ of the ‘Black Hen’, we do not mean the hypothetical trauma of the bastard Perovsky-Pogorelsky, but the author’s literary and artistic thinking, his personal mythopoetic code, which does not reproduce any existing mythology, but creates its own myth.
Mikhail Elizarov is a modern Russian writer and singer-songwriter. He is a winner of the 2008 Russian Booker Prize, the 2020 National Bestseller Award, and the 2020 Gennady Grigoriev Poetry Prize. His literary works include: novels ‘Pasternak’; ‘The Librarian’; ‘Cartoons’; ‘Ground’; short-story collections ‘Red Film’; ‘Hospital’; ‘The Nagant’; ‘Blocks’; ‘We went out to smoke for 17 years...’; and a collection of essays ‘Burattini. The Fascism has passed’.
