Steamship to Argentina and Runaways: The principle of movement in the poetics of the new literary world

Abstract

Today’s world is changing rapidly, and writers are sensitive to these dynamics in their work. This article examines the principle of movement in the poetics of two modern novels: Steamship to Argentina (2014) by the Russian-German writer Alexei Makushinsky and Runaways (2007) by Polish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. As the literary analysis demonstrates, the principle of movement is a constitutive element of the artistic whole of these novels. It defines the image of the character, plot, spatial and temporal coordinates, and figurative dimension. The very titles—Steamship to Argentina and Runaways—are metaphorical and esthetically significant. To reflect this significance, the authors of this article offer an alternative translation of the title of Olga Tokarczuk's novel. When published in English, it was titled Flights. However, Runaways is semantically closer to the original Polish Bieguni and, as the article demonstrates, correlates more strongly with the semantic level of the text. Drawing on M. M. Bakhtin's ideas on the historical poetics of the novel, this study concludes that the poetics of Steamship to Argentina and Runaways is a form of representation of the new picture of the world, dynamic and transitional. This new literary world is recreated through the mobile chronotope and translingualism.