The vagrancy plot and a new picture of the world in contemporary Russian literature

The article discusses the semantics of the motif of vagrancy as a variant of the motif of initiation, i.e. movement different from traveling, wandering, roving, sauntering, pilgrimage, nomadism, etc. In vagrancy, the semantics of movement testifies of the crisis in the relationship between the subject and the world, as well as about a free, non-deterministic discovery of the world (social and natural). The rupture and rebellion is reduced to the voluntary abandonment of the social status and estranged perception of reality; this excludes finalism, finding values, and returning to the past as a result of adaptation to a different way of life or exhaustion from wandering. The social cause of vagrancy is the collapse of the Soviet empire, the cultural causes are the transformations of the centrifugal culture into centripetal, of the individual consciousness into the mass consciousness. The civilization cause is the loss of illusions in the possibility to transform ontology. The literature on vagrancy does not only reflect the process of the social decline, but approaches the anthropological vision of person. The plots of modern novels about vagrancy apparently have genetic links with the travel stories of the heroes from ancient Menippea, the plots of picaresque literature, stories of romantic wandering, travelogues in the literature of Enlightenment, Sentimentalism, and Realism, as well as the stories of nomadism. If in Russian culture vagrancy is close to wandering, searching for a sacred place, in Russian literature of the second half of the twentieth century the vagrancy plot is linked with the birth of dissidence and rejection of social dictates (the prose of the 1950s-1980s). This phenomenon is explained by the philosophy of life (Nietzsche) and existential philosophy (Martin Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, Albert Camus). The post-Soviet tendency to reject society is explained through the postmodern philosophy of nomadism (Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari). The article deals with the novels, in which the motif of vagrancy forms the plot, and the narrative focuses on the new "nomad": a voluntary homeless, wanderer, wandering philosopher, who does not build life, but floats in the stream of life while observing all its manifestations. The world appears as a rhizome, with no center and hierarchy, as the world of metamorphoses and disappearances, not meant for people. Anthropologism of literature about vagrancy returns to ontology from textual civilization. The plot of vagrancy embodies the path of spiritual wanderings, the knowledge of the absurd of reality and metaphysical being, the situation of "nomadism to death" of the new nomad. Contemporary literature about vagrancy is drawn to two poles: ethological and philosophical discourses. The motif of vagrancy does not only "reflect" the marginalization of a person in today's society, but also expresses free knowledge of being without illusions. The article offers a typology of vagrancy plots (ontological, psychoanalytical, anthropological, ethological prose) and a typology of the vagrant characters (an escapist, a wanderer, a knave, a degradant, a flaneur).

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