J.A.A. Joyce’s type of chronotope in Mikhail Shishkin’s non-fiction “Russian Switzerland”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of the organisation of spatio-temporal structures in the novel “Ulysses” by James Augustine Aloysius Joyce and the literary-historical guide “Russian Switzerland” by Mikhail Shishkin. The general way of permeability of the boundaries of fiction – non-fiction genres and the reflection of this process in the world and Russian literature of the 20th–21st centuries is investigated. It is proved that for Mikhail Shishkin, as well as for J.A.A. Joyce, everyday life becomes an experimental field, where J.A.A. Joyce's deliberately destroyed time is rethought by the modern author into the category of simultaneity, which allows people and events separated by centuries to be viewed at one point in space. J.A.A. Joyce and Milhail Shishkin think of time as a way of organising events and facts as a spatial one, which allows us to present world history as a creative chaos of events, the expansion of which into the genre of non-fiction makes the narrative strategy more multidimensional, rather than as a system of causes and effects. The two authors are brought together not only by a common literary tradition, but also by an autobiographical understanding of emigration, thanks to which Mikhail Shishkin deliberately builds himself as a mediator between cultures, for whom J.A.A. Joyce’s speech techniques are a self-evident core of the artistic style of the new emigre prose.