The death of a subject as the death of a reader in the novel House of Twins by Anatoly Korolev

Anatoly Korolev's novel House of the Twins is considered as a continuation of traditions of Russian philosophical prose in postmodern poetics. Relationships between the characters, the events and the space itself acquire the status of the author's variants of the reality. The confrontation between different versions of the characters is not suppressed by the author's view and the symbolism of the portrayed cannot be interpreted unambiguously. The detective plot makes the novel structure look like a maze. It turns out that the investigation of a particular case transforms into a search for answers about the existence and the subject's place in it. The analysis of the system of characters and patterns of space in the novel allows comparing the central topos (the private Hegeweld Clinic, where you can be cured of craving for death) with a cultural space, and its owner with the author himself. The cultural space is inhabited with doubles. Firstly, they are not connected, they tell us about different aspects of existence. Secondly, each version of existence forks and, therefore, is depreciated by its alternative. No one possesses true meanings, the versions of existence change during philosophical disputes ("feasts") and do not lead to the knowledge of truth. The main character is a detective who penetrates onto Hegeweld's territory using a false name. He is considered as a Reader, the subject of perception of the world as text. When he gets onto the territory of the clinic, he accidentally becomes a listener of five disputes about the nature of existence and takes part in them. He tries to understand the ideas of the clinic inhabitants (who quote authors of the past), and he starts to be involved in Hegeweld's text. The Reader becomes a product of the locus text, which is analysed as a variant of the post-structuralistic concept of the Death of a Subject. As an ignoramus character and a detective (investigator) at the same time, the main character himself becomes a double of the reader and keeper of the sacred book, which was taken to Hegeweld as a criterion of profane versions. He has no code, so he reads it in the state of altered consciousness in order to decipher it. The sacred knowledge, which was read from the book, is not that of the character, it is only transmitted with his help, transforming the subject into a tool of language. The analysis of allusions to The Name of the Rose shows the polemic between A. Korolev and U. Eco, because it denies the possibility to escape from the plurality of relative texts about existence with the help of ironic tolerance and an ironic attitude to any fact. The author of the novel offers two endings: the victim character escapes from Hegeweld and commits a suicide (the death of a subject in cliche meanings of everyday life); the character returns to Hegeweld's world, where his consciousness is changed by texts and therefore is cured of the fatal reality. The treatment offered by the clinic is the feast of the spirit as an internal game with meanings, refusal from the knowledge of truth and from the tragedy of the lack of truth.

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