Article

Name: Biographical Plot in the Collection of Works “Poems. Book 1” by Yu. Kruzenshtern-Peterets

Authors: Anna A. Bogoderova

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation Novosibirsk State Technical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article deals with the biographical plot of Yustina Kruzenshtern, a representative of the Russian emigration in Shanghai. The work is performed within the framework of the structural-semantic approach, the method of motive analysis is applied. Three stages of the plot are described (frivolous youth, marriage with Nikolai Peterets, his death and the next stage of life), the accompanying motifs are identified. Peterets’s death of within this plot is the payback for some mystical guilt. A halo of mystery is created around the couple’s life through many occult motifs: fortune-telling, preordained and unbreakable bonding, mystical retribution. The heroine sees the key to understanding her tragedy in the European hermetic tradition (the Albigensians, Cagliostro, Papus, Tarot), but its meaning remains obscure and enigmatic.

Accompanying motifs of the house and the mirror reflect the mood or a stage of the heroine’s life, reveal the truth about herself. The plots of world literature serve as a kind of “mirrors”, looking into which the heroine learns her own life, her biographical plot.

A comparison of poetic and memoir self-portraits allows us to clarify the semantics of biographical motifs. In the poems, the motifs in the memoirs are expressed concisely, while in the poems they unfold into whole pictures. In the poems, Yustina Kruzenstern presents herself as a penitent sinner who failed to recognize the signs of fate in time, while in the memoirs she creates a positive image of a brave and strong woman who takes her fate into her own hands.

Keywords: Russian poetry in Shanghai, Yu. Kruzenstern-Peterets, N. Peterets, motif, biographical plot

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