The Taigans by G. Potanin and N. Yadrintsev as a predestined failure: the poetics of the conception

This article analyses the novel project of the leaders of Siberian regionalism G.N. Potanin and N.M. Yadrintsev which was not completed and up to 1997 was unavailable for literary scholars’ reflection. Recently three fragments of the unfinished text have been found and published. The first and the largest contains a picture of a mine, the second depicts the life of Tomsk and the third spotlights the way of life and customs of Siberian merchants. Scholars have reviewed the history of the text creation, reconstructed the paths along which the main idea was changing, the thematic and aesthetic lines of the co-authors. However, a unified view on the genre nature of Potanin and Yadrintsev’s work has not been elaborated, and its narrative structure has not been thoroughly studied. The very reason of how and why the regionalists’ idea of the novel collapsed has never become a point for scientific discussion either. Therefore, the aim of the present article is the explanation of the creative debacle of the co-authors by analyzing the features of the architectonics of the text and its genre dominants. To conduct the research in the given direction the author appealed to the theoretical heritage of M.M. Bakhtin, N.D. Tamarchenko, Yu.M. Lotman, V.I. Tyupa. The study of the peculiarities of the Siberian chronotope in the novel required the use of research works by N.V. Serebrennikov, K.V. Anisimov and Yu.V. Shatin. Alongside with the analysis of Potanin and Yadrintsev’s novel, the career of the both authors in literature was revised in the perspective of Pierre Bour-dieu’s theory of literary field. The analysis revealed that the novel project by Potanin and Yadrintsev is based on two contradictory strategies: idyllic, which includes everything that refers to thesemantics of “blissful”, “dedicated”, “local”, and novelistic, which in terms of the plot presupposes hero’s crossing numerous thresholds and includes sharp criticism of reality and the depiction of the main character’s aspirations in other social spheres. This article proves that the unintentional undermining of the novel’s viability by the authors is based on the coincidence of several factors: 1) peculiarities of the Siberian chronotope, which was mythologized and combined a number of directly contradictory characteristics in Russian literature; 2) the position in the literary circle of the both coauthors, who, as ideologically motivated provincials, aborted their attempts to “conquer” the centre; 3) the aesthetic program created by Potanin who summoned the regional writer to dedicate his destiny to the social milieu of his homeland. All mentioned above, as it is argued in the article, did not allow Yadrintsev and Potanin to build a coherent, balanced, independent main character, the main actor on the belletristic scene. Thus, the character was compelled to move simultaneously in mutually exclusive trajectories, i.e. he could not stay in Siberia, in his childhood dreams and aspirations, but also could not escape from the initial locus in order to construct his biography as a sequence of crossing the spatial and symbolic “thresholds”. It is because of this “structural” incompleteness, the pallor of the character, the absence of a complete formation in his life that the approaches to the narration did not obtain their logical and artistic completion.

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