Principles of cyclization in the collection of A.V. Ilichevsky "Dew Point"

Selemeneva Marina Valer'evna ORCID: 0000-0003-0083-9802 Doctor of Philology Professor, Department of Social and Humanitarian Disciplines and History of Law, Yury Luzhkov' Moscow Metropolitan Governance University 107045, Russia, Moscow, Sretenka str., 28 marselem78@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The search for points of intersection of different worldviews, the generalization of the multidirectional processes of meaning formation and the disintegration of meanings that have lost their value in the modern world is reflected in works that have a cyclical nature. The modern literary process reflects the dialectic of fragmentation and integrity in such epic cycles as "Zero", "Tenth", "St. Petersburg Stories" by R. Senchin, "Empty Trains 2020" by D. Danilov, "Go Fearlessly" by E. Vodolazkin, "Hidden Rivers" and "Nine Nineties" by A. Matveeva, "Love in the seventh carriage" by O. Slavnikova. These and similar works are created at the junction of documentary and artistic ways of reflecting the world and suggest a movement from the mosaic of themes, motifs, storylines to genre and style synthesis. Among the modern epic works having a cyclical nature, the collections of Alexander Ilichevsky stand out, in which a deep relationship between small and medium-sized genres is built, and the autobiographical material subtly fits into the general cultural context.

Current approaches to the study of the cycle and cyclization processes are assumed to rely on the academic research of M.N. Darwin, V.I. Tyupa, V.A. Sapogov, I.V. Fomenko, L.E. Lyapina, O.V. Miroshnikova ^{[6, 7, 8, 12]}, so is taking into account the latest concepts ^{[2, 3, 5]} An extensive body of research is devoted to the cyclization of lyrical forms, while the problem of the formation of cycles of epic texts is meaningfully comprehended mainly on the material of individual works. An example is the work of M.P. Abasheva and M.V. Kurylenko ^[1], A.Y. Bolshakova ^[4], E.L. Pivovarova ^[13], E.V. Ponomareva ^[14]. A.V. Ilichevsky's prose in the aspect of cyclization as a text-generating basis has not been thoroughly considered before, but it should be noted that T.L. Rybalchenko, O.V. Sizykh, N.A. Tomilova, L.G. Tyutelova made a significant contribution to the study of the genre-thematic range of his work. ^{[15, 18, 19, 20]}.

The researchers call the literary cycle "a group of works composed and combined by the author himself and representing an artistic whole" ^{[6, p. 392]}. The cycle is considered in modern science as a special genre, as a supranational education, and as a set of texts forming a book. We agree with Y.D. Burmistrova that "considering the cycle as a "supranational association" is the most promising, since such a view takes into account both the self-sufficiency of the text included in the cycle and its relationship with other fragments of the cycle" ^{[5, p. 74]}. As we noted in earlier studies, "the cyclical factors in prose include the unity of issues, the commonality of plot conflicts and collisions, an imaginative and stylistic solution, a single image of the author. The secondary genre features of the cycle are the general atmosphere of the work, end-to-end motifs and images, the variable development of themes, a special space-time organization, framing novels and the leitmotif of the narrative" ^{[16, p. 181]}.

In order to identify the semantic and structural foundations of cyclization in the prose of Alexander Ilichevsky, let us turn to the collection of novels and short stories "Dew Point" (2022). The process of cyclization in the prose of A.V. Ilichevsky involves the creation of semantic unity while maintaining the independence and even a certain self-sufficiency of each text included in the collection. Small and medium-sized forms in the book form a supra-genre unity due to inclusion in one of four cycles: "Mar Saba", "Dew Point", "Ashuluk's Throat", "English Road".

The poetics of the titles of the collection's cycles indicates that spatial images are an important tool for cyclization. Mar Saba is a monastery that has a tower for pilgrims. For the inhabitant of the tower, the sky and the desert merge, "you immediately find yourself in the sky itself" ^{[10, p. 76]}. Ashuluk is the left arm of Akhtuba, a water maze in which "space seemed to have condensed into a separate universe" ^{[10, p. 395]}. The English Road is the Ryazan railway "with a British accent", i.e. built by English engineers. A symbol of childhood, in which everything is shaky, fragile, temporary, waiting for changes. But since "it is impossible to live by the railway without a dream" ^{[10, p. 373]}, this spatial image is also a universal microcosm of the child, opened into the macrocosm of adults. The dew point is "the air temperature at which dew begins to condense" ^{[10, p. 216]}. In Ilichevsky's prose, this physical term becomes a metaphor for the maximum tension and concentration of the hero's vital supports, after which the inevitable finale comes, the point in the relationship and the end of a segment of the life path. Thus, the title-nominative complex of the collection is completely built on the basis of spatial models. A tower, a river, a railroad, a point on the map of San Francisco – any locus in the collection is associated with the space of the Universe and endowed with features of timelessness.

At the very beginning of the narrative, the motif of the path is set both as a leitmotif and the main means of cyclization. The path of the hero-narrator bizarrely connects points on the map of the earth and acts as the main artistic device that combines stories and novellas into a cycle. One of the key loci of the collection is the coast of the Caspian Sea. This locus embodies Ilichevsky's "inner understanding of happiness, peace, unity with the universe" ^{[10, p. 13]}. It echoes almost all other spatial images, since it is thought of as a starting point, the source of the hero's entire life path.

The key cyclical element of Ilichevsky's collection is the author's image, which has autobiographical features, and the concept of time. The stories of all four cycles of the collection are strung on a time axis in which "the future got lost and settled down to rest on the other side of the planet" ^{[10, p. 9]}. In part of the stories, Ilichevsky takes readers into the past, which is perceived through the prism of signs and harbingers of the future, in the main body of texts, the moment of the present is fixed with the prognostication of the consequences of current events.

Time in Ilichevsky's prose is inspired, personalized, endowed with personality properties: "... my future got lost and settled down to rest on the other side of the planet" ^{[10, p. 9]}. The search for the lost future, shining through in all the significant characters encountered, connects all four cycles of the collection and, thus, serves as a leitmotif. The hero-narrator opposes the philosophy of staying in the current moment, the principle of Carpe diem ("Catch the day") to the lost future Horace: "they talked only about what is around and now, not a word about the past, not a word about the future" ^{[10, pp. 29, 30]}. Fixation on the present allows Ilichevsky to endow an autobiographical character with the function of an observer.

The observer does not evaluate, does not interfere in the course of events, he records facts and situations. For example, stories about San Francisco ("West Sacramento", "Round Table") connect the image of the narrator-a pizza delivery man. This work provides an opportunity to "get acquainted with the very core of the city" ^{[10, p. 21]} and observe human types: "The city has already turned its face to me, I moved along the grid of its streets like an erythrocyte through the veins" ^{[10, p. 56]}. Ilichevsky uses a traditional realistic approach, indicated, for example, in O. de Balzac's autobiographical novel "Facino Cane": "I studied the mores of the suburb, its inhabitants, their characters. I was dressed as poorly as the workers, and they didn't shy away from me... listening to these people, I could enter their lives to the end. I felt their rags on my back, I walked in their leaky shoes. Their desires, their needs – everything moved into my soul..." (Balzac O. de. Collected works in 24 vols., vol. 11, p. 406). Becoming a part of the environment, the hero gets closer and practically merges with it, but does not get involved in its processes, maintaining the sharpness of vision and hearing of an outsider.

The appearance of the observer hero in a new environment for him is depicted in the collection through the motif of an airplane landing. In the story "Alabama Song", the narrator "fell from heaven like a grasshopper, arriving by air in the cheapest way – with a dozen transfers" ^{[10, p. 46]}. In the story "Sunfish", the arrival of the plane is perceived as the beginning of a new chapter in the hero's life: "... this is how my landing into a new life took place: it was like a pen dipped in an inkwell" ^{[10, p. 10]}. The use of this motif makes it possible to bring distant spaces closer together, instantly switch optics from one locus to another and plot-justify the rapid inclusion of the observer hero in new life collisions.

An important attribute of the observer hero is a camera: photography becomes a way not only of fixing, but also of accepting a new reality. By putting a camera between himself and the world, the hero pulls away from reality, and at the same time gets the opportunity to study it better, save the most important things in the pictures. The camera is perceived as a continuation of the hero, endowed with signs of physicality ("as if this piece of ice glass was my heart" ^{[10, p. 132]}). This detail was previously used by Ilichevsky in the quadriga "Soldiers of the Absheron Regiment" (the cycle of novels "Matisse", "Persian", "Mathematician", "Anarchists") to focus on the hero's detachment from reality and, to some extent, protection from it: "... the lens is the best barrier to vision in front of the world, the matrix is the best retina, the blind is the eyelid. Click – and I'm gone, now I don't need to see it, grind it, yearn. <...> I need a shutter click, as a recapture of what is happening, I must maintain the rhythm, even if the camera is empty, the flash card is full, but it must click" ^{[9, p. 271]}. In the Dew Point, photography is rather a tool for comprehending reality, rather than detachment from it, for example, the hero of the story "Two Fears", lost in the taiga, perceives the process of photographing as a therapeutic and encouraging means: "... when I was completely discouraged, I was looking for a frame" ^{[10, p. 129]}. It is symbolic that the hero has only reflections in the pictures, the taiga paintings themselves are not preserved, so that in the future it would be easier to forget the terrible adventure.

The main natural elements also act as a tool of cyclization in Ilichevsky's prose. Water (sea or river) is often described collectively as the source and the end, the cradle and the grave. The characters of "Dew Point" have a special relationship with water, referring to the artistic world of A. Platonov. In the story "Sunfish", the hero recalls how he was left by his father on one of the rocks in the middle of the sea surface of the Caspian Sea. The father sailed away for a long time and when he returned, the son "was already crushed by a sunstroke" ^{[10, p. 13]}. This story is a reinterpretation of Plato's plot about Sasha Dvanov and his father ("Chevengur"). Mitri Ivanovich "secretly <...> he did not believe in death at all, but most importantly, he wanted to see what was there: maybe it was much more interesting than living in a village or on the shore of a lake; he saw death as another province, which is located under the sky, as if at the bottom of cool water, and it attracted him" (Platonov A. Chevengur: Novel and Novellas, M., 1990, p. 9). N.M. Malygina, commenting on the Chevengur motif of the hero's immersion in the bottom of Lake Mutevo, notes: "For them, immersion in water meant a transition to another dimension, a return to a state of "substance of existence" from which, under favorable circumstances, one can resurrect for a new life" ^{[11, p. 51]}. The narrator's father from "Sunfish" grew up an orphan in the Caspian Sea, "the sea was more dear to him than his mother's womb" ^{[10, p. 13]}, in his "substance of existence" the boundary between life and death is as shaky and passable as in Plato's heroes. For his abandoned and miraculously surviving son, the water element also embodied a childish belief in immortality ("No one thought to treat me at home, I just overslept the essence and got up like new" ^{[10, p. 13]}).

Many heroes of the collection "Dew Point" have a special relationship with water. Hunter Nikolai ("Two Fears") gives the lakes names and feels a special affinity with the water element: "My grandfather called all the lakes in his domain by name, because his grandfather also called these lakes. And I'm calling" ^{[10, p. 118]}. The hero of the story "The Old Man" perceives water as a symbol of eternity and the immutability of the world order: "I have always loved the river. In his youth, in childhood, the current attracted the imagination to the sea, to love and adventures, to picturesque grain countries from invisibility. Now I am at peace on the river, and my gaze is turned, on the contrary, to the upper reaches, to the understanding that the river also flowed in smooth insensibility for thousands of years before, comprehending oblivion from edge to edge" ^{[10, pp. 150-151]}.

The water element is endowed with Ilichev's feminine features, for example, in the story "Salt" the Poet suddenly remembers his beloved, who "became his main flaw once" ^{[10, p. 140]}. The reason for the sudden rush of memories is the diplomat's wife, who in her voice and appearance reminds of a distant love from the past. The concentrate of the sea element becomes salt, which the Poet pours into the pocket of a stranger who stirred up the memories of his youth: "... he decided to place the particles of the ancient ocean – the one over which the spirit of the formless and empty earth was hovering, the dried drops of eternity, its crystals, in a suitable frame" ^{[10, p. 140]}. A woman embodying the water element, slush, salt, complements the traditional archetype of the earth woman in the artistic world of Ilichevsky, i.e. the generative, maternal principle. The ground at the "Dew Point" is often shown as a swell, viscous, loose, marshy, i.e. a flimsy support. The earth/sea antithesis is thus weakened, the earth and the sea as natural elements are not polarized, but complement each other.

The motif of childlessness, and often conscious, is associated with the water element and femininity, which has a watery, swampy, absorbing nature at the "Dew Point". So in the story "Salt", the diplomat's wife "does not want children at all, but is afraid to admit to herself, and does not want to upset her mother and father" ^{[10, p. 137]}. Nadia Stefan ("Cloud") is endowed with self–sufficient femininity, her beauty is a source of pleasure, not procreation ("They did not have children from the very beginning, and then she did not want to" ^{[10, p. 89]}). Nadia's house on the banks of the Dniester River is a space constantly flooded with water. The heroine walks through the flooded house and yard, as if merging with nature: "Speaking towards the dawn, she carried herself as a sacrifice, a reward, showed useless beauty to thickets, birds, insects" ^{[10, p. 91]}. From the house in the water, the heroine moves to Venice, a city on the water, and merges with the city as well as with the water element of nature: "The city, Venice. The city is her lover, she is poisoned by its beauty, which people only interfere with" ^{[10, p. 99]}. The house in Moldova, where Nadia lived with her husband, and the house in Venice, where Nadia worked as a nurse for an old countess, are anti-homes on the water, where there is no place for love and children.

The heroine's homelessness and childlessness are shown through the symbolic images of two birds - a stork and a hawk. The stork as a messenger of life and the hawk as a messenger of death appear at crucial moments in the heroine's life (family breakup, decision to leave for a foreign land). Rare attempts to find a loved one (a casual connection with a professor of mathematics) or to dream about a child ("her unborn baby sometimes filled with the flesh of a dream, but each time it was replaced by a feathery void, as if a hawk was hitting a dove" ^{[10, p. 102]}, face reality. In reality, instead of a child, an old woman, instead of intimacy, loneliness. There is a convergence of the two poles of life – youth and old age: the soul of a young woman turns out to be "fertilized by corruption" ^{[10, p. 101]}. The heroine becomes a centaur: the soul of an old woman settles in Nadia's young body. Before Nadia's death, a hawk appears again ("a hawk hides its head under its wing so that it never wakes up again" ^{[10, p. 108]}), and the heroine returns to her kindred water element, becomes a part of it. Instead of handing over the body to the earth, it is shown how "the plain of water shines" ^{[10, p. 108]}.

The earth as the source of life, as a support and generative womb is shown by Ilichevsky through female images that reveal another facet of beauty – images of women dreaming of children or carrying a child. In the story "On the Roofs of the World", the heroine, aspiring to motherhood, puts on a mask to get to the Wailing Wall and touch the "childbearing stone". In the story "Glory", the foot of Echka Dagh becomes the habitat of two communities – hippies and expectant mothers. With all the different directions of life strategies, these inhabitants of the bay professed love and freedom. The narrator specially came to this place every year in September, because "the majestic beauty of a pregnant woman was highly appreciated by him" ^{[10, p. 144]}. The narrator character, who is an observer, associates himself with the sea element. Future mothers – bearers of earthly power, "a specially made up of stones maternity bed" ^{[10, p. 145]} symbolizes the severity and sanctity of the delivery process.

In general, the theme of new life in the collection is end–to-end, the narrator's actual locus is a house on the edge of Jerusalem on the border with Bethlehem, which immediately introduces a biblical context into the narrative: "On the top of the mountain stretching in front of my window, once the prophet talked with an angel. And somewhere on its western slope, Mary, feeling the contractions, dismounted from the donkey and hurried back to Bethlehem" ^{[10, p. 26]}. Biblical motifs and images are woven into the narrative so organically that antiquity seems to be modern, New Testament plots side by side with the events of short stories and novellas: The hero of the story "The Bottle" falls asleep in a cave in the middle of the desert and finds milk intended for a baby as a means of quenching thirst; in the story "West Sacramento", the narrator catches fish to overcome his longing for his abandoned homeland. Fish as a symbol of faith (in Christianity, fish is an acronym for the name of Jesus Christ) is necessary for him to regain ground under his feet, to find a lost future (the original motive of the entire collection). The fish that the narrator did not catch in West Sacramento is seen by him on Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow: "I looked up, and it seemed to me that the same huge fish swept through the gusts of a blizzard" ^{[10, p. 24]}. Thus, Ilichevsky's search for faith is associated with the search for a home. The reference points on this path are the Caspian Sea, Moscow, and Jerusalem. Each spatial image is shown through the optics of home/homelessness and is given as a stage not of the journey path, but of the journey path, a point of spiritual growth.

The Caspian Sea is the locus of childhood, a symbol of home and faith in the infinity of the universe. In San Francisco, the narrator will dream of those deep-sea fish that he saw as a child in the Caspian Sea: "The fish swam above me in the blinding darkness, grabbed my hair with their mouths and pulled me up, away from the depths of oblivion" ^{[10, p. 13]}. The Caspian Sea is a cross–cutting spatial image that marks "its own" (the Iranian from the story "Sunfish", Yuri Ivanovich from the story "Two Fears") and acts as the archetype of the house, projected onto all further points of the life path.

In Moscow, an "exorbitantly large city," the narrator focuses on several key spatial images. Sokolniki is the locus of love and youth. In "Elegy for N." this area acts as the starting point of memories: "In Sokolniki, her skates are still ringing, the gear brake is grinding and pirouetting" ^{[10, p. 15]}. Presnya is a "fabulous area" ^{[10, p. 31]}, which is the place of barricades and the address of "Clouds in trousers". This is a typical capital, where both ordinary and extraordinary events take place on a daily basis. In the story "Sukhotsvet" Presnya is the habitat of two dogs Sherlock and Makar, friendship, conflicts, love, death. Tverskaya Boulevard is the heart of Moscow, where the hero-narrator comes immediately after returning to his homeland. Ilichevsky's Moscow is mostly winter, snow-covered, illuminated by dim lanterns. Memories of the capital are, as a rule, thoughts "about that first snow, about the Picturesque street, about the openwork bridge at the gates of Serebryany Bor" ^{[10, p. 66]}. Even in those stories where the image of a noisy and festive capital has been created, the heroes exist on the sidelines of this holiday of life: "Moscow was breathing lights, crowds were walking near the observation deck, bikers' motorcycles roared <...> Something is cold, it will soon become like glass..." ^{[10, pp. 341-342]}. In the story "Slow Boy", Vorobyovy Gory, Neskuchny Sad, Malaya Gruzinskaya act as a background for the general unhappiness and unhappy family life of the characters. As the Caspian absorbed the happiness of childhood, so Moscow absorbed the hopes and disappointments of youth.

In the collection "Dew Point", a series of abandoned houses forms the leitmotif of homelessness. Recalling the apartments, houses, dormitories, hostels in which he lived, loved, suffered, the hero-narrator summarizes: "The houses in which he lived, dream one after another. There are birds in them now and it's raining. You walk around inside, looking for a place to hide. Everything is uninhabited, and then it rains, then it's cold, then now strangers ..." ^{[10, p. 74]}. Ilichevsky's abandoned houses are getting wet in the rain, new dwellings are flooded with the sun, because in them "the air is driven by novelty" ^{[10, p. 75]}.

The assemblage point of all semantically significant loci is Jerusalem. This city is shown as a crossroads of different cultural codes and a synthesis of all the moral and philosophical searches of the hero-narrator. The description of the actual attitude of the hero contains a reference to the story "How I caught little men" by B. Zhitkov. The narrator feels like "a tiny sailor of a ship sailing under the sleeves of the Holy Virgin" ^{[10, p. 26]}. The invented world of tiny men, for whom sugar is harvested on the deck of a ship, is projected onto the world of revived biblical legends surrounding the narrator. The city of maturity, wisdom and the primary results of life is perceived as a kind of repetition of the world of childhood, a return to the pages of the "Little History of Art". The "tiny sailor of the ship" builds a parity relationship with the vast world: "Man, of course, is small, even insignificant, but all this – both the desert and the stars – means nothing without this negligibly small magnitude" ^{[10, p. 80]}. This thesis is conveyed to readers through the composition of the collection (transferring the action from the Caspian Sea to Moscow, Alabama, Elmau, Venice, Jerusalem, Ilichevsky mounts the action as a multiplicity of intersections of the vital roads of inhabitants of different houses, cities, countries, epochs) and through internal semantic firmware (the leitmotives of the way, home, natural elements provide ideological and artistic the synthesis of action reveals the philosophy of a human wanderer experiencing Bunin's "longing for all countries and all times").

The study showed that the main principles of cyclization of prose texts in A.V. Ilichevsky are the principle of autobiography (events of the past and present appear in the collection as an occasion to talk about personal life lessons, as an analogy with events of the distant past, as material for literary allusions), the principle of parallelism of states of nature and the inner world of the individual, the principle of intercultural relationships, the principle of leitmotivities (with the apparent incoherence and heterogeneity of the plot material, stories and novellas permeated by a network of common leitmotivesare perceived as a single narrative).