The Russian China as a historical chronicle and a lyrical plot («Poem without a Subject» and «Two Stations» by V. Pereleshin)

The paper discusses «Poem without a Subject» and the prosaic memoir «Two Stations» by V. Pereleshin. Valery Pereleshin was part of the junior branch of the Russian émigré community in Harbin. The value of his literary work lies in its attempt to preserve the poetic atmosphere of the Russian China and to compose a chronicle of its life. The first part of the article, captioned «‘Onegin’ in Chinese», discusses «Poem without a Subject» which was written in the second half of the 20th century using Pushkin's «Eugene Onegin» as a model and can be considered an «encyclopedia» of the Russian literary life in China in the 1920-1940s. An important structural feature of the poem is the inclusion of numerous Chinese borrowings in the Russian text. The Chinese borrowings (as well as borrowed vocabulary as a whole) do not just add an exotic flavor but also eliminate the linguistic monotony of the text and change its composition. The linguistic diversity of the poem is related to its lyrical composition and also, as demonstrated in the article, parallels the ekphrastic quality of the text which is capable of combining a multitude of images interconnected not by a plot but by verbal-phonetic links or lyrical emotion. The structural unity of the poem is preserved through the unity of the autobiographical lyrical ego while the author’s personal biography is described against the background of a martyrology of the 20th-century Russian poets who died in Russia, Harbin or as emigres in Europe. Thus, Pereleshin interprets the history of the Russian China both as a series of Chinese-stylized lyrical images and a series of historical names and facts that are elevated to a legendary stature through the poem’s lyrical force. The article also analyzes «Poem without a Subject» as part of the post-«Onegin» literary tradition. Finally, the climactic point of the poem describing the lyrical hero’s love affair with Liu Xin is discussed from the standpoint of the influence of M. Kuzmin’s homoerotic poetry. The motif of homoerotic love is related to the treatment of the flow of time in the poem. The eternal and inexhaustible renewal of generations is interrupted and yields to a different «formatting» of time that transfers existence from an actuality into a potentiality. The second part of the article analyzes a fragment from Pereleshin’s prosaic memoir «Two Stations».

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