“Residual Meanings” and the Aesthetic of Intermediality in Pavel Saltzman’s Central Asia in the Middle Ages

Abstract

This article analyses Central Asia in the Middle Ages, an unfinished novel by Pavel Saltzman (1939–1950), first published in 2018. In the novel, the aesthetic of film editing and the discursive “madeness” of the narrative used by the author, which refers both to the literature of German Romanticism and to Eastern historical and literary sources, transforms an example of artistic avant-garde into a fundamentally new work in terms of artistic features. According to the article, the literary game of the Gothic novel employed by the author gives Saltzman’s text the dynamics of a spectacular film text, which conceals several symbolic and associative meanings. These include the adventurous narrative itself, the medieval historical plot, the inevitable associative parallels with the tragic pages of the history of the twentieth century, and the philosophical and aesthetic comprehension of man and their place in the world in the spirit of the German Romantics and modern postmodernism simultaneously. The research methods in relation to this literary text rely on the semiotic theory of Yu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspensky. The results of the study are determined both by the author’s approach and modern literary and cultural studies concepts of Aage A. Hanzen-Löve, I. S. Kukui, and O. D. Burenina-Petrova. The novel is analysed for the first time according to the directions of “residual” memory of the author’s text that are relevant to this work, primarily in intertextual connection with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs, as well as according to the cinematic ways of expressing the narrative. The author proves that Saltzman’s text relies on the principle of compositional film editing, which brings it into the sociocultural discursive practice. Additionally, the article traces intertextual links between the two novels in the plot and thematic aspects, concluding that the text is original for modern literature and determining the prospects of its transfer in sociocultural practice.