Categories of things and words in the works of M. P. Shishkin (based on the material of the novels "The Taking of Ishmael" and "Venus' Hair")

Savelyev Gleb Andreevich Postgraduate student, The Department of Russian Literature of XX century, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119991, Russia, Moscow, Leninskie Gory str., 1 gleban.savelev@gmail.com

The thing considered by academician V. N. Toporov as a philosophical category is not a static, fixed in time and space formation. Following the provisions of the works of the German philosopher M. Heidegger, Toporov argued that a thing should constantly become a thing, "acquire the status of a thing, differing from a thing-like something to which the predicate of substance is not applicable" ^{[14, p. 15]}.

Recall that one of the lines of Heidegger's philosophy solves the question of the essence of a thing. As a modern researcher writes about this: "Heidegger is trying to revive, resurrect a thing deconstructed by scientific knowledge" ^{[12, p. 88]}. Indeed, in the work "The Thing" (1950), the philosopher wrote that "forced <...> scientific knowledge destroyed things as such long before the atomic bomb exploded" ^{[15, p. 319]}. Cognition, according to Heidegger, should be directed at the thing "in itself", existing "as a determining reality" [Ibid.] (note 1). According to S. G. Sycheva, such an aspiration has an "anti-symbolic" character ^{[12, p. 90]}, since the consciousness of the subject, aimed at comprehending the thing itself, abolishes the complex relationship between the thing and the sign (note 2). The researcher emphasizes the importance of this type of relationship and the expression of the thing in the symbol: "He (the symbol — G. S.) does not lead away from "the things themselves". It leads to them. The principle of "To things themselves" is realized when we remember that some things are symbols and that symbols are things (our italics are G. S.)" [Ibid.].

The position that a thing is not perceived by consciousness outside of its symbol or sign was also decisive for V. N. Toporov. Thus, starting from Heidegger's thesis about the "basic mode of a thing" (note 3), Toporov argued that "substance means to inform about a thing, i.e. to overcome its materiality, turning into a sign of a thing (our italics are G. S.) and, consequently, becoming an element of a completely different space — not materially-material, but ideally spiritual" ^{[14, p. 15]}. Language, as the scientist believed, "spiritualizes" [Ibid., p. 7] a thing, introduces it into a system of spiritual relations (one of the parties of which is a person) and, thus, increases the "status" of a thing.

So, we proceed from the idea that the sign of a thing (namely, the word referring to it) is a higher form of existence of a thing, determining its ability to enter into non-utilitarian relations with a person ("... language mediately connects <...> everything in the world with a person, if only that's all can be expressed in the language" [Ibid.]). In turn, the inclusion of this sign in an artistic text significantly complicates the "form" of a thing, endows it with new, artistic meanings, since "the meanings and meanings of speech (linguistic) signs in artistic texts <...> turn out to be the "names" of other — super—speech, metalinguistic - signs" ^{[13, p. 20]}.

On the other hand, the nature of the functioning of a thing in a literary text cannot be entirely reduced to such a "semantic deepening", about which Yu. M. Lotman wrote, criticizing the position of the formal school of literary criticism about the realization of the aesthetic function of the text exclusively through form (note 4). The definition of poetry as "utterances with an attitude to expression" ^{[21, p. 275]}, given by R. O. Jacobson (one of the founders of the formalist association OPOYAZ), corresponds to our ideas about the functioning of the sign of a thing in the text. The sign of a thing included as a link in the composition of a trope (for example, comparisons or metaphors) becomes part of an artistic image with immanent aesthetic significance. The thing is no longer raised to the second "degree" (the degree of the linguistic sign as such), but to the third (note 5). So, when Yu. K. Olesha in his poetic memoir book compares a puddle located under an autumn tree with a gypsy (note 6), both initially perceived objects (puddle and tree) "outgrow" their empirically observed qualities (in particular, the diversity of leaves turns out to be a significant quality for a tree) and enter the system of artistic relations with the second link of comparison — an imaginary image of a brightly dressed gypsy. A thing mediated by a word becomes the very form of artistic expression.

The work of M. P. Shishkin, in our opinion, is a case of the interaction of two "multidirectional" tendencies in solving the problem of "thing — word": the construction of an artistic symbolic reality from empirically perceived objects of the world and the preservation of the image of the world in an act of creativity equal to the verbal fixation of the mental process of perception. In this article, we want to show that, despite Shishkin's postulated value preference for the thing itself (and more broadly, life) to the word, in his novel work of the 2000s, the word can become the main, defining "reality" of the text, more significant than the thing to which it refers. The latter, in turn, indicates that the writer's creative practice becomes deeper and more significant than his worldview, often expressed journalistically (for example, in an interview) or implicitly in a literary text.

In the domestic and foreign literary studies of the 2010s, there was an opinion about the primacy of the ethical content of Shishkin's novels over the aesthetic, that is, directly over the form that has an independent artistic value. For example, A. Skotnitska considers the corpus of Shishkin's novels as a textual unity on the basis that each individual work expresses "a certain general meaning (our italics are G. S.)" ^{[11, p. 66]}. This meaning, according to the researcher, is realized in the form of specific themes and motives: "movement between loss and hope, decline and salvation" [Ibid., p. 68], "death, discord" [Ibid., p. 72], "resurrection, memory, decay" [Ibid., p. 76]. Also S. Orobiy (author of the first and currently the only monograph devoted to Shishkin's work (note 7)) writes about the value predominance of the content component of the writer's creativity over narrative sophistication: "No matter how sophisticated each novel is constructed, it boils down to universal, generally understandable categories: the birth of a child ("The Taking of Ishmael"), "resurrection" of singer Bella ("Venus hair"), <...> life and death ("The Letter-writer")" ^[9]. Finally, our attention was attracted by V. G. Moiseeva's report "The Evolution of M. Shishkin's Prose" (note 8). According to the author of the report, the nature of Shishkin's creative searches is determined by the conflict "between "fact" and "letter", life and word, ethics and aesthetics" ^{[7, p. 318]}. Considering these oppositions in the "long-term" aspect (that is, throughout the writer's creative path), V. G. Moiseeva concludes that the resolution of the designated conflict in Shishkin's last novel "The Letter Writer" (2010) is in favor of ethics.

In the works cited by us, researchers turn to the implementation of the "life — word" relationship in Shishkin's creative practice. The concept of "life", which occupies the place of the first "variable" of this ratio, can include a wide range of phenomena. In interviews of the 2000s - early 2010s, Shishkin himself often expressed the idea of the importance of the "non-verbal" in relation to the "verbal" (note 9), and also outlined a number of "life-oriented" themes implemented in his novels: "... what could be more interesting than childhood or adolescence, relationships with parents, first love, relationships with children, infidelity, divorce, death? Real natural deaths, not detective deaths. Every novel is about this" ^[5]. However, the problem of "life — word" can be translated into the plan of the relation of a thing and a word (or rather, the perception of a thing and a word), since "life" for Shishkin's heroes is also the perception of material objects of the world, awareness of their presence in the space of things.

Projecting the provisions of the writer's interview about the significance of the "non—verbal" on the "thing- word" relationship, we can make the assumption that in Shishkin's value system, the process of sensory cognition of a thing, differentiation of its qualities, etc. are above the act of artistic transformation of a thing. In the novel "The Taking of Ishmael" (2000), one of the creative principles of the writer was designated as collecting a "collection" of perception images. Having sent the text of his "novel" to the editorial office of Pionerskaya Pravda, the hero (note 10) receives a kind of "feedback-instruction": "If you see something around you that seems unusual, interesting or just funny, take it and write it down. Maybe it will be a sunset that struck you, or a tree, or just a shadow" ^{[17, p. 483]}. Despite the fact that this "instruction" in the novel is continued by ethical problems ("Or something will happen next to you, good or bad. Or you will do something that you will think about, for example, offend someone next to you ..." [Ibid.]), it is obvious that one of the tasks of the author is to preserve the visible image of the world.

Nevertheless, already on the material of the "Taking of Ishmael" it is possible to trace how the written fixation of perception images turns into a verbal and artistic image that has a high degree of internal independence and leads the reader away from the directly perceived thing to an artistic verbal construction. When the hero Alexander Vasilyevich enters into a sensual (note 11) interaction with the reality (note 12) of the novel, he is not limited to an accurate description of what he sees. With the help of means of expressiveness and originality of the artistic vision of the world, the hero-narrator builds an image that we consider as an independent artistic unit, for example: "I drank tea while looking out the window. There a flock of birds circled over the trees, as if someone was chasing them with a spoon, like tea leaves (note 13)" ^{[17, p. 22]}. A visually perceived object (a flock of birds), mediated by a language sign, in the above quote becomes significant precisely as part of an artistic image. The consciousness of the narrator, therefore, is directed not so much to the preservation of visible reality as to the creation of a verbal and artistic image. Also, speaking about his own room, the hero does not state what is actually observed, but creates a poetic version of the existence of objects: a room "walled up with bricks of books" [Ibid., p. 23]; a mirror "in which a right—handed person lives (i.e. reflecting a hero who is left-handed - G. S.)" [Ibid.]. Complicating the perception of things from the point of view of communication, these images become significant from an artistic point of view.

We observe the alternation of types of description of the world in the diary of the heroine Olga Veniaminovna (graphically not separated from the main narrative). Enumerations, direct fixation of the observed ("On distant peaks — snow. The coast, planted with palm trees, phytolaks, <...>, pleasantly rubs the eyes" ^{[17, p. 95]}) interact with a subtle nuance of the visual image, achieved only by means of language ("... the sea is gooseberry" [Ibid., p. 97] — using such an epithet, the narrator does not just "show" the shade of the sea but it also reveals one of the potencies of language hidden in non-artistic discourses, namely the ability to describe the color (or shade) of a thing by means of its correlation with a well-known, but meaningfully distant object). The heroine recalls the moment of turning her consciousness "into sight and hearing" [Ibid., p. 100] ("... small grains were falling from the sky, and pigeons were sweeping the snow with their wings from the pavement — the rustle of feathers on the asphalt..." [Ibid.]) — accordingly, in this episode the word becomes only an instrument for focusing attention on feelings. Further, however, this principle of "recording" reality, free from a complicated form, again turns into a metaphorization of the material environment: "I share my room with the natives — small persistent ants. <...> You break off a piece of croissant left overnight on the table — they have already taken root in the nostrils, like monks in caves" ^{[17, p. 102]}.

Such stylistic "balancing" between a thing and a word is also characteristic of the novel "Venus Hair" (2005). The main thematic vector of the novel is the "resurrection" of the life lived by a person in the word. During the interrogation (stylistically going far beyond the ordinary interrogation), refugees learn that their material stay in the world is less real than the stories told about them ("... you are your story" ^{[16, p. 58]}). The interpreter (the hero-translator) receives instruction before writing a biographical book about a famous singer of the last century: "The essence of the book is like an uprising from the grave: here she seems to have died, and everyone forgot about her, and then you tell her: get out!" [Ibid., p. 111]. The heroine-singer herself formulates the idea of preserving life in a word on the pages of her diary: "And I need a notebook (note 14) in order to write down in it those feelings that no one but me has experienced, is not experiencing and will never survive!" [Ibid., p. 465].

Meanwhile, the poetics of the novel cannot be characterized only through the task of "resurrecting" or "preserving" the image of the world. The consciousness of the heroes, directed at the external, material world (and at the thing as an integral unit of this world), tends to move from direct observation to a poetic image. Thus, the interpreter's material environment is included by the narrator in the composition of the tropes: "A red umbrella is lying on the lawn, like a cut on a grass skin" (note 15) [Ibid., p. 14], "... frost has struck <...>. Everyone's moustaches and beards turned silver, and everyone carried a breath in front of him, like an airy cotton candy on a stick" [Ibid., p. 109], "And right above St. Peter's (St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome — G. S.), a dark living spot is spinning. A huge flock of birds. <...> It's as if a huge black stocking is flying across the sky, which is being turned inside out all the time" [Ibid., p. 197]. According to A.V. Ledenev, it is for the narrative line of the interpreter that the use of such details is characteristic, which "are not functional in the plot, but are justified by the very idea of creative transformation of life" ^{[2, p. 142]}. Each individual thing or set of things perceived by the narrator "overcomes" its material meaning in the act of artistic creation, as a result of which we can assert that the word in the novel acquires the status of "artistically transforming" [Ibid.] (and not only "resurrecting").

Ultimately, the narration of the "Venus of the Hair" can turn into a stream of poetic speech, for which the "content" becomes the very form of utterance (note 16). The "testimony" of refugee heroes is based on this principle. Initially meeting the genre requirements of interrogation (brevity, informativeness, accuracy of the formulated answer), their stories gradually turn into narrative prose with a lot of plot digressions, descriptions and rhetorical techniques that make it difficult to perceive the facts. For example, the story about an unnamed "bodyguard" is filled with stylistically colored vocabulary and metaphors ("You earned your daily bread — <...> — by serving as a bodyguard for a successful journalist, a clever and mean-spirited TV show host, poor, but adored by mortals, because it brought hope and grains of light to their huts and palaces" ^{[16, p. 37]}), fairy-tale images ("God knows where the materials about the source of evil came to the named journalist from. It was all about the needle. The needle was hidden in an egg, an egg in a drake..." [Ibid.]), as well as descriptions including characteristics of several spaces at once ("The seer's room smelled of smoking tar, and outside the window in an old tree under the bark there were writings eaten by a bug, in which he described his bug life..." ^{[16, p. 40]}). Finally, at a certain point in the narrative, the sequence of events and actions is disrupted by an unmotivated "description of nature" (note 17), entirely based on the principle of metaphorical transformation of the visible world: "Around a dragonfly stuck to a ray of the sun, a glassy halo" [Ibid., p. 48], "The river crawls like a plast and drags algae for hair" [Ibid., p. 49], etc. In our opinion, this type of narrative is aimed not at the resurrection of the visual image, but at revealing the abilities of artistic "vision" and the possibilities of artistic expression.

The main material for this work was M. Shishkin's novels of the 2000s, namely "The Taking of Ishmael" and "Venus's Hair", but we cannot but indicate the vector of further development of Shishkin's creative principles. The novel "The Letter-Writer" that followed these texts is characterized by the poetics of "pure" perception: the act of writing for the characters is the imprinting of an image of the world, that is, the perceptual "imprint" that reality leaves in the mind of the narrator. The word in the novel becomes precisely a way of conveying the characters' worldview, ethical meanings, etc., and not an artistic goal. "And the smells from the garden! They are so thick, dense, they stand in the air like a suspension" ^{[18, p. 10]}; "You have just come from the polyclinic, with a fresh filling in your tooth — the smell of the dental office from your mouth" [Ibid., p. 16]; "I want winter so much! Grab a mouthful of frosty air. To hear the crunch of footsteps on the floor ..." [Ibid., p. 253] — such constructions permeate the entire text of the novel and lead not to the reality of words, but to things lying in the plane of sensory cognition (note 18). Therefore, following V. G. Moiseeva, we can assert that in Shishkin's last novel, the conflict of ethics and aesthetics ^{[7, p. 319]} (in the light of our theme — things and words) is resolved in favor of the former.

Let's summarize the above. The quotes from the novels given in the article illustrate the action of the creative mechanism of the transformation of a thing (a thing is a linguistic sign — an artistic image), which we designated at the very beginning. These few examples give an exhaustive idea of this creative principle, and their quantitative multiplication would not make qualitative changes in the understanding of the phenomenon. At the same time, there is another significant trend in Shishkin's work, which we have designated as the preservation of the image of the world. If the novels "The Taking of Ishmael" and "Venus's Hair" are marked by the interaction of two trends, then "The Letter Writer" represents a variant of a "purified" art form that concentrates a voluminous, perceptually saturated image of the world. The work of M. Shishkin, thus, goes through a circle of aesthetic and ideological development from multidimensional verbal constructions to the reproduction of the flow of life in the text — which is appropriate to compare with how the hero of the "Letter Writer" struggled "all his life through complex things to the simplest" ^{[18, p. 282]}.

Notes:

1. This provision appears in other formulations in other works of the scientist (see, for example, "The Question of Technology" (1953): "The essence of a thing, according to ancient philosophical teaching, is what it is" ^{[15, p. 221]}). In the article we do not pretend to any complete study of the question of things in Heidegger's philosophy, therefore we do not quote such famous works as "Being and Time" (1927), "The Origins of Artistic Creation" (1935), etc. The involvement of such sources would require a multidimensional consideration of the category of a thing from the point of view of its philosophical aspects. We only outline the semantic lines that connect philosophy with the theory of literature.

2. S. G. Sycheva writes about the relationship "symbol — thing". While translating the problem into a linguistic and further into a literary plan, we use the term "sign", meaning by it a linguistic sign: "material-ideal education <...>, representing the subject, property, relation of reality" ^{[20, p. 167]}.

3. "The main mode of a thing, in Heidegger's words, is in its substance" ^{[14, p. 15]}.

4. Cf.: "One of the main provisions of the formal school is that the aesthetic function is realized when the text is closed to itself, <...> the plane of expression becomes some immanent sphere that receives an independent cultural value. The latest semiotic research leads to the opposite conclusions. Aesthetically functioning text acts as a text of increased, not reduced, semantic load in relation to non-fiction texts" ^{[3, pp. 203-204]}. However, Lotman further writes that "the formal school has undoubtedly made the correct observation that in artistically functioning texts attention is often focused on those elements that in other cases are perceived automatically and are not fixed by consciousness" [Ibid., p. 204].

5. That is, the degree of an artistic image — this mathematical metaphor is used by us by analogy with how O. E. Mandelstam described the process of translating directly perceived reality into a value-higher reality of the word: "... the poet elevates the phenomenon to a ten-digit degree, and the modest appearance of a work of art often deceives us about the monstrously condensed reality that it is possesses. <...> This reality in poetry is the word as such" ^{[4, p. 142]}.

6. "In fact, I had a stock of great metaphors. <...> It was a metaphor about a puddle on an autumn day under a tree. The puddle, it was said, lay under the tree like a gypsy" ^{[8, p. 267]}.

7. "The Tower of Babel by Mikhail Shishkin: the Experience of Modernization of Russian Prose" (2011).

8. The report was read at the IV International scientific conference "Russian literature of the XX–XXI centuries as a single process (problems of theory and methodology of study)" in 2014.

9. For example, regarding the novel "The Letter—writer": "The Letter-writer is the same novel as all my other texts (our italics are G. S.): an attempt to catch the non-verbal with words, to translate what constitutes life into the language of language" ^[6]. It should be noted that some poetic features of the "Letter Writer", indeed, make it a novel about the "non-verbal". However, the author extends this principle to all his work, which, in our opinion, is contradicted by the artistic features of his other novels (this is discussed later in the article).

10. In the autobiographical epilogue of the novel, there is no distance between the hero and the author at all; the autobiographical nature of the main narrative line of the novel related to the life story of Alexander Vasilyevich (in particular, the relationship between the hero and his wife Katya) is also revealed. In view of this, the epilogue can be considered as a kind of author's commentary explaining the writer's ideological position and his view of the meaning of verbal creativity.

11. From the entity. 'feeling', denoting "the ability of a living being to perceive external impressions" ^[1].

12. Despite the fact that we consider a literary text as a symbolic structure that "imitates" reality, for the hero of the work, this structure becomes the "primary" reality, the only one accessible to empirical knowledge.

13. Here and further in quotations from the texts of M. Shishkin, our italics are G. S.

14. The notebook in which the heroine kept a diary.

15. In the above fragment, A.V. Ledenev sees "styling for Yuri Olesha" ^{[2, p. 141]}. Interestingly, V. B. Shklovsky considered Olesha's metaphors as a means of an "updated" vision of the world, a creative transformation of reality: "Plot metaphors are Olesha's vision system. He sees a dragonfly and that it looks like an airplane. Olesha himself notes that he sees two possibilities: one subject does not replace, but updates (our italics are G. S.) the other" ^[19].

16. Cf. Shishkin's insightful judgment, made in connection with the work on the book "Montreux — Missolungi — Astapovo: In the Footsteps of Byron and Tolstoy" (2002), written in German: "It was a non-fiction book, where language was only a means of transmitting information, whereas in normal (i.e. artistic — G. S.) The book language is a valuable living being in itself. It does not transmit anything, it is information in itself" ^[10].

17. "They entered the entrance and, <...> and began to slowly climb the stairs. <...> There was a clang of a distorted shutter. You realized that it was for you, and then the description of nature began" ^{[16, p. 48]}.

18. Undoubtedly, the text of the novel is also filled with metaphors and comparisons, but the tropes in the novel rather serve as a means of extreme subjectivation of perception images. For example, this is how the heroine conveys the image of the sea seen for the first time: "I ran out onto the bridge, and it exploded from the surf — and I immediately received a wet slap from the sea" ^{[18, p. 44]}.