The locus of the house in the novel “There lived an old man and his wife” by E. Katishonok

Abstract

The article studies the artistic space of house in E. Katishonok’s novel “There Lived an Old Man and His Wife” (2006) in the context of a typical family chronicle, which emphasizes the resonance between personalities (family members) and their social environment. The aim of the study is to reveal the representative features of house by means of a structural-semiotic description and by exposing the construction identities of the author’s individualized model of the world. The article determines the specificity of the house locus in the novel and analyzes the immanent constructions that ensure the integrality and organisation of its inner space. We underline the relativity of the boundedness of the house, which, in fact, remains in dynamic movement, and represents the energetic interaction of the Ivanov family’s self-space with the surrounding society. The house, first of all, turns into an Old Believers’ model of the world, it correlates with their traditional way of life, family and lineage. The conducted research proves that the house locus is conceptualized by E. Katishonok as a special world with its own internal rules, committed to the transformation due to the impact of both internal causes and external forces, which leads to a spontaneous adaptation to the dominant societal perceptions.