The Closer You Look, the Stranger it Gets’: Perm in Ivan Kozlov’s Literary Journalistic Walks

Abstract

This article belongs to the field of Urban Literary Studies. It examines the cycle of city walks by Ivan Kozlov, a poet and journalist from Perm, which has been published since 2016 in online magazine Zvezda . Kozlov’s walks represent multimodal texts combining a photo report and a story. The verbal and visual narratives are closely intertwined, and photographs functionally act as equivalents to descriptions. Analysis of an extensive but comprehensive array of texts makes it possible to identify current trends in the literary and journalistic representation of the city theme in the 2010s. The subject of the analysis is a vision of or a look at the city realised in a cycle of walks. Relying on John Urry and Jonas Larsen’s interpretation of the gaze (vision) as a social and cultural construct, the author singles out cultural codes that determine both the selectivity of the look, and the order of interpretation of the seen in Kozlov’s walks. The associative fields which the author refers to during his walks are mainly connected with the motifs of the fantastic in popular culture and the visual aesthetics of urban exploration. The key semantic category of the vision of the city in I. Kozlov’s walks is defined in the article as the ‘strangeness’ of the city. Kozlov’s category of ‘strange’ is associated with the feeling of the ominous or uncanny, which emphasises the irrational aspects of urban space. The author’s poetic vision of the city reveals the actual complexity of urban space and its heterogeneity, which was described by such city theorists as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel Foucault. Using the conceptual apparatus of Lefebvre, the author argues that the city in Ivan Kozlov’s walks is revealed primarily in the aspect of space of representations, as a source of artistic inspiration, and spontaneous self-movement.