Article

Name: The Image of the Heroine of V. Yanovsky’s Story “Love the Second”: Intertext and Autobiographical Context

Authors: Elena N. Proskurina

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

In the section The Plot, Motive, Genre

Abstract:

The article is devoted to a little-known story by the young emigrant writer V. Yanovsky “Love Second”. The author is known to the modern reader mainly by his memoir book

“The Elysian Fields” (1983). However, he has a considerable artistic heritage, among which the analysed work takes one of the leading places. Thematically, it continues the plot line of homeless meaningless existence, which is topical for the young emigration, which connects it with the works of such authors as Gazdanov, Poplavsky, Felsen. Some fragments of the heroine’s search for a job are based on the biography of the writer himself. In this part of the plot, the influence of the “human document”, relevant to the poetics of the authors of the young emigration, is strong. However, unexpectedly Yanovsky turns his plot in the direction of the heroine’s discovery of the meaning of life, who discovers God through a sudden mystical experience. In this part, the plot is enriched with a new series of intertextual cross-relations, including the prose of L. Tolstoy, “The Book of My Life" by St. Teresa of Avila, Poplavsky’s novel “Apollo Bezobrazov”.

Keywords: V. Yanovsky, prose of young emigration, “human document”, intertext, mysticism in literature

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