Time and space in Wild Berries by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The article reviews the research of space and time categories in the literature (M. Bak-htin, G. Genette, Yu. Lotman, M. Frank). The object of the analysis is the various levels of the image of space and time in Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Wild Berries novel (1981): from the real time of narration in Siberia and the past in Leningrad to the events of the '70s in Chile and Honolulu. Space and time as artistic tools in the novel serve primarily to express the character and attitude of the characters. In addition, the space-time picture of Wild Berries shows the marked author's contrast between worldviews and cultural systems. The past in Russia and Chile is different: the tangible has a negative function and the intangible a positive one, and in the logic of the narrative the former is associated with selfishness and capitalism, the latter with selflessness and socialism. The novel contrasts civilization and nature, the latter is not only mystified, but is also portrayed as a heterotopia excluded from modern society. It is the peripheral space and time of the Siberian nature in the novel that has the meaning of the different, the repressed, the forgotten value which must again become the key one. Nature hides a potential for the moral renewal of the individual and the society. The positive content of the novel - in the supranational or, more precisely, international, yet strange and expressionless view of the astronaut - has an anti-civilization and past-oriented trend, and stereotypical images emphasize this trend. It is in this, as well as in the mythologizing of nature, that Wild Berries is close to the village prose of the 1970s.

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