Information about the author:
Andrey E. Agratin
Andrey E. Agratin — PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, the Department of Theoretical and Historical Poetics, Russian State University for the Humanities, Miusskaya Sq. 6, 125047 GSP-3, Moscow, Russia; Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Science, Povarskaya St. 25A, bld. 1, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4993-7289
E-mail:
This study was carried out at IWL RAS with a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 22-18-00051), https://rscf.ru/project/22-18-00051/
Abstract:
The fictional world of S.D. Dovlatov’s “Reserve” (1983) is conditionally divided into two segments: the museum-estate, on the one hand, and the area outside it, on the other hand. The latter exposes the unpredictability and disorderliness of existence, the former provides order in the character’s life. In the reserve, Alikhanov does not have to delve into himself — it is enough to “mechanically fulfill his role” and, thanks to this “reduction” of selfhood, maintain relative calm. The museum-estate is a space of irresponsibility, of performance, of the word without obligation. The character is comfortable in the reserve: any encounters with its inhabitants and guests take place at the level of speech activity. The word confuses the hero, “dissolves” his identity. For the hero, the museum-estate is a metonymy of the entire Russian-speaking culture, the borders of which he is afraid to cross, because he reduces his own self to speech activity (“In a foreign language we lose eighty percent of our personality”). Dovlatov’s “Reserve” shows how the “estate topos” undergoes fundamental changes in 20th century literature: from an axiologically significant phenomenon, the estate is transformed into a “product” of discourse that does not provide the character with reliable resources of self-identification.