Metamorphoses of genre strategies in E. Vodolazkin’s novel “The Aviator”

Abstract

   The article is devoted to the metamorphosis of genre strategies in E. Vodolazkin’s novel “The Aviator”. The article analyzes the narrative activity of the writing character and the author’s creative intention, aimed at a life-description strategy, which determines the poetics of the work as a whole. The character’s attitudes of self-determination influence his discourse, the distance between Platonov and the perceived realities and events. The article highlights the ratio of different channels in the character’s reception of his ego and the outer world – visual, acoustic and kinesthetic, and characterizes the connection between the present and the past in the main character’s world-picture, which leads him to timeless universals. We also consider Platonov, Geiger and Nastya’s speech correlations, which form the “undifferentiated unity” of their voices, the dialogic interactions of the main character’s words not only with the utterances of other characters, but also with “ready-made” precedent texts and idioms. By referring to the words of “others”, the author determines the intertextual aspect of the novel’s structure and introduces archetypal images (hell and paradise) in the text and the fictional world of the work. The subjective and transpersonal point of view of the writing character, the image of the world as a result of his narrative activity and the structure of the storyline transform the life-description strategy into a hagiographic one, making the act of writing sacral. The genre interoperation clarifies the meaning of the novel’s title and its epigraph.