Article

Name: AN ALPHABET OF RUSSIAN POETRY ( TATYANA TOLSTAYA’S «THE SLYNX»)

Authors: E. V. Kapinos

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

In the section Literary Life of the Plot

Abstract: The article discusses Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel «The Slynx» which is structured as an «alphabet novel», with each of its 33 chapters captioned by its own letter of the alphabet. Such alphabetbased texts, somewhat akin to children’s ABC books, were a relatively common phenomenon in the 20th century literature. The individual parts of these alphabet- or game card-oriented compositions were typically quite autonomous and allowed a high degree of variability in the way they were put together by the author. Such is the case with the individual chapters of «The Slynx», a «library novel» whose protagonist, Benedict, is a scribe and an avid reader of books. The novel contains numerous quotes from the Russian poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries which form an odd poetic wreath inside the prosaic text. For Benedict, the quotes function as an ABC of the bygone days while the novel’s author uses them as a tool that allows her to rearrange all kinds of poetic, fairy tale, skaz and linguistic meanings. Such rearrangement produces an unexpectedly parodic effect and throws new light on the classical texts. The gaps in the alphabet structure of the novel have a special significance. Thus, while the chapter titles generally follow the letters of the Old Slavonic alphabet, Tolstaya omits the letter «zemlja» («earth»). This omission makes sense in the context of the novel’s fantasy plot which involves a destruction of the land (country, Moscow) by the «Blast» and the «consequences» of that event which include, first and foremost, its impact on the language. «The Slynx» is a novel about language and its history, about words and letters, the autonomous essence of each sign of the alphabet, the fluidity of meaning, the coincidence and divergence of poetic and everyday usages, and the way words’ meanings change with the passage of time. The catastrophic plot of the novel includes a poetic subtext that is deliberately emphasized by the author: namely, it is primarily the poetry of Alexander Blok and Natalia Krandievskaya- Tolstaya that dominates the novel’s wreath of quotations. As to Blok, the article points out a number of intertextual features that create a connection between «The Slynx» and Alexey Tolstoy’s revolutionary novel «The Road to Calvary» in which Blok serves as the prototype for the poet Bessonov. The motif of the cataclysms of the past (the 1917 revolution, the time of troubles, the Moscow fires) is overlapped in «The Slynx» with that of the modern-day catastrophe, allowing the author to collage together the archaic and the futuristic. Equally fascinating are the quotations from Krandievskaya-Tolstaya. The article discusses two of these which deal with the depictions of a lion and a mouse and thus echo the novel’s bestiary which includes the two polar images of the slynx and the mouse.

Keywords: tatyana tolstaya, the novel «the slynx», an alphabet text, a catastrophe novel, a catastrophic plot, folklore motifs, novelistic bestiary, alexander blok, natalia krandievskaya- tolstaya, alexey tolstoy

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