Hermeneutics of the Avant-Garde Text: Experiment with Genre Exposition in I.M. Zdanevich’s “Admiration”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the actual problem of interpreting the avant-garde text in the literature of the Russian diaspora, as well as the search for relevant methodological approaches and techniques for its analysis. The texts of one of the most radical representatives of the Russian avant-garde of the first wave of emigration, I.M. Zdanevich (Ilyazd). The purpose of the work is to study the features of poetics and the construction of the novel “Admiration” by I.M. Zdanevich as an experimental text, as well as revealing its relationship with the literature of the era under consideration. The study uses comparative historical and typological methods, motivational analysis and discourse analysis, as well as deconstruction strategies that reveal the internal inconsistency of the avant-garde text and the meanings hidden in it. We have established that “Admiration” is the embodiment of the principles of “all-ness” – an artistic criterion developed by Ilyazd, which is characterized by the leveling of the concept of “original”, the absence of frames and the optionality of such creative categories as inspiration and talent. In this regard, the authors of the article propose an innovative approach to the avant-garde text, which consists in the widest possible range of its interpretations in the spirit of “all-ness”: from a traditional novel with its own original plot and characters to a philosophical novel, a novel-myth and a novel about an artist and the problem of creativity (metanovel). We came to the conclusion that “Admiration” by I.M. Zdanevich is a novel in which the writer uses the experiment as a set of aesthetic principles and artistic techniques that allow him to realize his own original concept of new art. Using the limitless possibilities of the novel genre and combining in the novel as a whole the features of its various modifications – adventure, philosophical, sentimental, symbolist, futuristic novels, myth-novel, poetological novel, I.M. Zdanevich was able to conduct an experiment on the destruction of genre boundaries. We also found that “Admiration” by I.M. Zdanevich is moving closer to the literature of magical realism, and this opens up new horizons for future research.