Poetics of the "generational" plot in A. Ilichevsky's novel The Mathematician

A model of the "generational" plot in the Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries has been reduced to the image of the "generational conflict'' in any classic version, such as the Oedipus complex (a generational conflict on the biological and genetic basis),fathers and sons (a generational conflict on the socio-historical basis). Literature at the turn of the 20th-21st century records the gap of generational communication or their transformation into rational and superficial in the situation of technos power, globalization, computerization and media technology. It is hard to identify the generational plot in the novel by Alexander Ilichevsky The Mathematician (2011): there is no explicit inter- or intra-generational conflict, the image of generation communication in real time is reduced. Here the "generational" storyline is linked to the development of the subjective idea of the main character about the mathematical resurrection of the dead ancestors' genes and to his travels around the world in searching for the space to reach the "transcendent" meeting with the resurrected generations. The article connects the strategy of explaining the poetics of the "generational" plot with the originality of the author's poetic of the character (by Yu.M. Lotman). In The Mathematician the poetics of the character and the poetics of the "generational" plot presuppose the main character's reification and technocratization of his own thinking that embodies the ideas of the post-Soviet, post-industrial generation. Being in abstraction, which is necessary for the development of the idea of resurrection, the character begins to think about himself as a "computational and model machine'' and about people and objects around as the images of the hidden reality or as figures of their own thinking. This article explains the poetics of the stream of consciousness, the symbolization of images of consciousness, the substantialization of symbols as well as the character's interpretation of language, as the plot presents the character's identification of the structures that connect the reality (life-world) with the subconscious (intuition) and the mind (the rational). Thus, the character researches the text in different aspects as a structure that links the living with the non-living and vice versa, the non-living with the living. His travel and landscape observations allow the character to understand the connection of the living and the non-living implemented in the space of reality. During his travel around Russia and Ukraine the character of Ilichevsky is not focused on assessment of civilization, history and culture as an objective and immutably existing reality, he peers into the landscape trying to find interconnection between the signs it hides in order to expose the existence codes of people who used to live and die here. At the end of the novel the character immerses into the ''cave'' of climbers on Khan-Tengri Mount three times and thus goes into the mountain ''bosom'' (mother's bosom). He experiences the situation of a symbolic birth-death (returning to the mother's bosom and Nothingness) and at the same time the situation of coming back to "humanity'' (emotions, body). The character's discovery of the true experience of being-nothingness-being confirms by his dream on the mountain about the resurrection of the dead mountaineers which came true.

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