Joyce’s Literary Tradition in Mikhail Shishkin’s Prose and Its Evocation in the Story “The Blind Musician”

Abstract

In this article, Mikhail Shishkin is presented as a literary successor to James Joyce’s modernist tradition of writing. The nature of the ties connecting his creative method with that of Joyce is considered in two aspects which also qualify the narrative structure of his texts, namely the autobiographical and intertextual ones. While the autobiographical features of Joyce’s works can be estimated by his numerous biographies and archives, the facts from Shishkin’s life, the writer being our contemporary, can mostly be judged on by their creative interpretations in his own literary works. However, in its degree of truthiness, Shishkin’s autobiographical prose is in large excess over that of Joyce’s who would rather tend to aesthetic transformations of his life in the art forms. The two writers’ life stories themselves demonstrate a noticeable parallelism: both are linguistically sensitive; both did similar jobs along with their primary, literary occupation (a teacher, a journalist, a lecturer, a translator); for both, mother’s death of cancer and the child’s illness are reflected in recurrent literary motifs; both left for Switzerland to write about homeland from the meta-distance of the artist. Shishkin follows Joyce’s strategy of interlacing the intimate, painful episodes of his personal life into the literary texture of his writings. The very episodes of the lives of the two writers belonging to different national and historical cultures are quite identical, too. It is only that Shishkin goes further than Joyce in directness and candour, thus putting Joyce’s principle of mimesis on edge. This ultimate autobiographicity makes Shishkin, on the one hand, a successor to the tradition of Russian classical literature (remember his “love for Akaki Akakievitch”), as well as the tradition of truth in the 20th-century literature. On the other hand, it attaches him to the postmodern trend of transforming text into reality. Anyway, unlike postmodernists who are destroying literary discourse together with the characters articulating it, Shishkin “plays” with it in order to bring the novel back to life. Aesthetically, Shishkin reproduces and expounds Joyce’s theory of the “rhythm of beauty”, his technique of radical intertextuality and anastomosis connections of “all in all”. The story “The Blind Musician” has every trait of modernist poetics outlined above. The plays with light and darkness set by the cyclic rhythm of the day/night alternation and by regular shifts from mimetic to mythopoetic (intertextual) discourse are the structural narrative devices similar to those used by Joyce. Joyce’s characters, like Minotaurs, are wandering blindly through the labyrinth of Dublin until they arrive at the visionary moment of epiphany, when the beauty of a trivial truth lights up in their minds. Shishkin’s ideology is also modernist in character, since his “new linguoworld” is created as a mode of reconciling man with this world’s imperfections and as a mode of clarifying its sense.