Motives and images of destruction in I. Klekh's prose

The works of modern Russian writer Igor Klekh (b. 1952) are representative in terms of implementation of the poetics of destruction connected with the images and motives of disease, deformation, madness, death, etc., cross-cutting the late 20th-century literary process. In the earlier novels "Diglossiya" ("Diglossia") and "Pominki po Kallimakhu" ("Funeral Feast for Callimachus) there appears the motive of illness and pain, invariant for Klekh's prose. The very title of the first story is the idea of human disharmony, their doom to exist in the "parallel worlds" of spirit and flesh, past and present, reality and dreams simultaneously. According to Klekh, it is only through the pain as the "quintessence of being" that the person is able to comprehend the life. In the short story "Inostranets" ("The Foreigner") and the story "Khutor vo vselennoy" ("Bowery in the Universe") the author continues to explore the inner space of the contemporary by means of destruction poetics. The narration in "Inostranets" is based on the reception of defamiliarization and the whole complex of destructive motives, among them - disease, madness, death. Defamiliarization reveals not only the absurd of the Soviet reality, but also the senselessness of human existence in general. I. Klekh contrasts the defamiliarized perception of Russia by a foreigner to a compatriot's view in the story "Khutor vo vselennoy". The story contains a spectrum of meanings of the disease motive and acquires mythological and sacred meaning. In the story "Krokodily ne vidyat snov" ("Crocodiles do not see dreams") I. Klekh, referring to the motive of memory, depicts the modern "inner person". Hero's memories are penetrated by the idea of an endless series of losses. At the same time he realizes that these painful experiences constitute the essence of his inner life, being supports of the "building" of his soul. In the autobiographical novel "Svetoprestavlenie" ("Doomsday") there arises a motive of writing-confession. By confessing the hero, in the language of psychotherapy, "goes into his fear", which allows him to overcome the fear of nothingness and find inner harmony. In the story "Smert' lesnichego" ("Forester's death") the theme of madness is central. It develops spirally. Initially, madness characterizes specific characters: the Shcheka family and a "moronic ninth grade student" Marusya Boguslavskaya, later the wife of Ivan Shcheka. Then the motive of madness unfolds in the evaluation of the lifestyle of a small provincial town. Next, the theme of madness becomes the evaluation of human life as a whole and appeals to the well-known Shakespeare's formula about "a tale told by an idiot". So, the poetics of destruction in I. Klekh's prose is not only one of the fundamental principles of artistic representation and organization of the event-side of the artistic work, but also a key strategy of the writer's artistic anthropology and gnoseology.

Keywords

Authors

References