Infantile discourse in the prose of Dmitri Gorchev

Abstract

The work of Dmitri Gorchev is regarded as a phenomenon genetically related to “electronic literature.” This paper deals with his two books: Zhizn’ bez Karlo: Muzyka dlya ekzal’tirovannykh startsev (Life without Carlo: Music for exalted elders) (2010) and Ya ne lyublyu Pushkina: Iz Zhivogo Zhurnala (I don’t love Pushkin: From the LiveJournal) (2013), both based on the author’s blog in the Live Journal. Both books reveal a plot unity, defined by an infantile worldview of an autobiographical hero, whose reception is indistinguishable from the author’s. The central image of the first book, Pinocchio, becomes the embodiment of freedom and childhood for the author. The image of Pushkin in the second book is associated with the adult world. The Soviet childhood evokes ambivalent feelings in the protagonist: nostalgia and traumatic experience. The unity and artistic originality of Gorchev’s books are ensured by the childish, infantile view of the world of the autobiographical protagonist and his life-creating strategies of escapism, as well as by the density of the allusive layer dating back to the children’s reading and animation. The childish, naive view of the author defines his poetics that is close to primitivism. Nowadays, the Internet has become a breeding ground for the emerging phenomena of primitive art, combining folklore/mythological images with the images of mass culture and high culture. The images of Pinocchio and other characters of children’s books and cartoons used by Gorchev have become archetypes of the new mythology of the “mass” / post-Soviet person.