Sergey Arno’s Personal Comments on the Value of Literature and the Function of Literary Criticism Incorporated in His Works

Abstract

On the one hand, Sergey Arno’s prose stands out due to its black humour, full of paradoxical thoughts and absurd imaginations, but on the other hand, it deals with the condition of literature, its function, value, and literary criticism (i.e. its assessment). Apart from addressing literary subjects, his works relatively often reveal autobiographical and self-referential elements. For this reason, it is possible to extract from Arno’s texts fragments investigating the value of literature and its assessment that can be identified with the author’s own position. This article is an attempt to reconstruct the writer’s views based on four of his works in prose: three fictional pieces and one non-fiction book.