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Abstract:

The article based on a vast body of Eduard Limonov’s novels of the mid-1970s – early 2020s presents the first attempt to analyse his prosaic heritage as a unified and highly confessional autobiographical egotext constructed as an intertext. The author of the article singles out five major levels on which the intertextual principle is actualized in Limonov’s prose, defining its basic structural and stylistic characteristics and the means of organizing the textual matter. Special attention is paid to the strategies of presenting the dual author-protagonist image as well as to the main themes and problems used to construct his (self)identity, i. e., power, revolution and war, love, freedom, sexuality, heroic deed, death, etc. The undertaken intertextual analysis leads to the conclusion that key life periods, crucial collisions, and people connected with them reconstructed in numerous novels were the means to construct Limonov’s author-protagonist identity as an ambivalent one, oscillating on several levels from the social to the professional, creative, gender and, finally, existential ones, with a definite number of roles presented in the form of binary oppositions.