Ontological aspects of the subject matter in new novellas of Andrey Bitovsnovel The Teacher of Symmetry

The article explores the completed variant of the novel The Teacher of Symmetry (2008), on whichAndrey Bitov had been working for about 30 years. The article is mainly focused on the previouslyunknown parts of the novel, as they bring in a new subject matter in comparison with the known twovariants of the novel (the journal variant of 1987 and the book variant of 1988). The earlier variants putforward the problem of text: the possibilities of creating ones own text and text as a means of existentialself-identification. The new fragments of the novel put forward the problem of connecting text andreality, problem of the nature of meanings (they manifest themselves from reality and are brought intoreality by text), and the problem of meaning and existence of reality itself, ontology.The article explains these semantic shifts in the new variant of the novel. It interprets the functionsof the mystification of authorship (the author introduces himself as a translator of the book by anEnglish writer E. Taird-Boffin about an English writer Urbino Vanoski, whose novellas are introducedinto the text of the novel) and the problem of authorship of the texts in the process of readingtranslatingmeanings. The article interprets the metaphorical nature of the plots of the novellas in thenovel representing different situations of mans clashes with shaky reality and the function of the introductionof a Russian plot into the novel (the scholars Anton and Tishkin), demonstrating thedependence of mentality on the space of existence (comparison of the insular English and boundlessRussian mentalities).The article singles out the meta-textual layers of the novel connected with the intellectual, philosophicalarguments of the characters about word, culture, and physical and meta-physical being. In Bitovspostmodernist poetics of play and variability, one finds the realistic basis of his aesthetics (therecognition of life, reality, ontology as an object and criterion of interpretation) and ontological basisof word, text, art, and culture determining Bitovs conception.

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