Poetics of Transformation in I. Silantyev’s The Light of Arkhangelsk

Abstract

This study focuses on The Light of Arkhangelsk, a prose collection by Igor Silantyev, a Novosibirsk-based author and philologist. The subject of the analysis is the poetics of transformation that unites all the works in the book. The autobiographical framework that forms the subject of the memoir determines the creation of the author’s artistic myth, in which everything is possible: a mixture of present and past, past and unprecedented, the real and the unreal. Allusions to the works of Gogol, Hoffmann, N. A. Ostrovsky, and other writers flicker in the text. At the same time, the reminiscent field of the collection is fraught with wide possibilities for interpretation. The book is also full of many musical leitmotifs. The author plays with genres masterfully. In his artistic universe, confession is mixed with fairy tale, legend, dream, horror, etc. And vivid images undergo many metamorphoses, arising in the memories of the self-narrator through the principle of complicity. At the same time, all the meanings found in the collection are devoid of direct manifestation but are presented from the position of homo ludens — not in the postmodern meaning of a literary game for the sake of the game. However, the grotesque phantasmagoria of transformation does not become the theatre of the absurd in the book. The ethical position of the author, whose emblem is the title of the collection, puts a limit to such confusion. The plot of I. Silantyev’s book conceals many different states of mind presented in the light of the “final understanding” of the finiteness of earthly existence and the eternity that opens behind it. It is no coincidence that the leading leitmotif images in it are wings, the sun, the dawning sky that has overcome the night. This essential layer supports the basis of hope, which is so shaky in today’s world that is losing value orientations.