Characters' Diaries in Mikhail Shishkin's Novel Taking Izmail

The study aims to analyse the ways and functions of including fragments of characters' diaries into Mikhail Shishkin's novel Taking Izmail (1999). The use of the genres of documentary literature in a work of fiction makes it possible to perceive a fictional text as a true reproduction of life phenomena, and it is a common technique in Shishkin's works, which exist at the junction of various aesthetics: realism, modernism and postmodernism. The study relies on traditional literary methods: analysis of the genre, the plot, the narration and the system of motifs that combine hermeneutic, narratological and semiotic approaches. The semantics of the diary in the novel is also considered in the philosophical aspect: in terms of phenomenology, existentialism and poststructuralism. The diary in the novel occurs twice and belongs to the minor characters: Olga Veniaminovna, the adult mistress of the still young lawyer Alexander Vasilyevich, and Vladimir Pavlovich Motte, a doctor-pathologist, who, in a situation of an imaginary court, is accused of "not helping his neighbour"; Motte is the doppelganger of Mikhail, the narrator and the protagonist of the novel, close to the former ideologically. The characters' diaries are the diaries of "I as the Other" for the narrating character (and the author), the personal and the private, recorded "for oneself", yet they are made the object of understanding, and "reading" by the author as a document of someone's phenomenal life. The inserted diary texts lose the status of documentaries. Their irreality not only reveals the character's psychological state, the destruction of their understanding of reality, but also allows the characters' subjective myths created for themselves to be interpreted as different versions of the author seeking to comprehend the world beyond his personal subjectivity. The reason for the characters' refusal from ego-writing is revealed: it is the loss of illusions for Olga Veniaminovna, and the immersion into the mythologization of reality for Motte. The analysis of the narrative fragments designated as diaries led to the following conclusions. In the novel Taking Izmail, the diary transforms, yet preserving the traditional semantics of truthfulness and psychological analysis. Firstly, the diaries are unable to reflect reality, they are not a fact of the characters' lives in time and space, i.e., they lose their function of preserving reality. Secondly, Shishkin's diary also loses its epistemological properties: it does not fix the characters' inner lives, their reflections. For the characters, the diary is a form of escapism from the awareness of the tragedy of being (existential, national, ontological), escape from life into words, it is writing that recreates reality, fixes the characters' myths. The inclusion of the characters' diaries makes it possible to challenge the postmodern interpretation of writing in Shishkin' s novel as escapism and a way to overcome death.

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