Deciphering and objectification of semantic boundaries in Venedikt Yerofeyev's short story "At My Window"

Bezrukov Andrey Nikolaevich ORCID: 0000-0001-7505-3711 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Ufa University of Science and Technology (Branch in Birsk) 452455, Russia, Republic of Bashkortostan, Birsk, Internatsionalnaya str., 120-V, sq. 9 in_text@mail.ru Other publications by this author

One of the iconic figures of the first wave of Russian postmodernism is Venedikt Yerofeyev. It is advisable to compare his work with the beginning of the formation of the so-called new literary aesthete, a new look in the format of artistic creativity. Consequently, the texts of Venedikt Yerofeyev fully fit into the nomination of the poetics of postmodernism, without any serious and constructive criticism. The principles and manner of the author's writing are focused on overcoming the pure realistic tradition, the Veins stand out in the prose. Yerofeyev's craving for experiment, simulation, a literal game of text, playing with text. The linguistic layer of his prose, thanks to intertextual inclusions, creates the effect of expanding the semantic field.

The main work that characterizes the manner, the special handwriting of Venedikt Yerofeyev, is the well–known poem "Moscow – Petushki", which was written in 1969. In the critical literature, this book has been studied quite well, there are dissertation projects, there is a set of scientific articles, observations of a proper analytical nature related to the decryption of the specified text. Venedikt Yerofeyev's small prose has been studied less voluminously, although a number of research developments are devoted to this form. It seems that the analysis of small, not such fundamental texts by the specified author allows the figure of Veins. Yerofeyev can be represented more objectively and more accurately in the circle of iconic names of Russian postmodernism, because following the general principles of semantic dispersion can also be observed in Tatyana Tolstoy, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Mikhail Elizarov and a number of others. The reception of an essayistic form tending to the story "At my window" is quite productive and relevant, since there are no point studies devoted to this work in criticism. Thus, the novelty of this article lies in the objectification of the meanings of this work, while the practical significance is reduced to a stepwise analytical assessment of the story. The purpose of the research can be focused on objectification of the semantic paradigm of the story "At my window" with an indication of the techniques and principles used within the framework of poetics.

At the beginning of the article, it is worth noting that almost all small genre forms of Venedikt Yerofeyev reach the reader in a truncated mode: these are fragments, not quite complete records, a diary version, a fragmentary narrative. The author himself has repeatedly noted that texts are not born immediately full-fledged, careful, scrupulous work is needed to prepare the essay. The only exception, I think, can be "Moscow – Petushki", a text that is interesting. Yerofeyev created it quickly enough. However, there are many flaws in it, but maybe this is for the best, since the gaping of meanings is possible when both the text and the plot ^[1] and the figurative series flicker, which demonstrates the author's relaxed artistic drawing. In our opinion, it is essential for a writer, and a postmodernist one at that, to expand the boundaries of fictional reality, to enable the reader to draw an objectively visible perspective, to outline a new round of connotations, semantic meanings, sometimes not indicated at the first reading, at the first acquaintance with the text. The paradigm of interpretation of the work in the art of the late twentieth century is maximally shaken, revealed, and represents a rhizome that is not fully visible, even with careful study.

The story "At my Window" was written by Venedikt Yerofeyev during his studies at the Orekhovo-Zuyevsky Pedagogical Institute. Note that this text is not fully completed, it ends with the quote: "Your goals are unknown, O Lord; and your ways are inscrutable" ^{[2, p. 20]}. The obvious stylization of the Gospel text gives reason to assume a rather serious, even sacred, intention of this text. A significant part of the work has been lost, and it is not yet possible to restore it fully and holistically. The date of writing – April 18, 1960 – obviously indicates the day of completion of the essay, or an attempt to specify the time of reflection, which is also debatable. Presumably, the story "At my window" was started during illness, because the editorial comment ^{[2, p. 87]} is there, the work was completed by Easter, which is also symbolic and iconic. For Venedikt Yerofeyev, the religious theme was not taboo, attempts to reflect on the world within the framework of Christian dogma are found in "Moscow – Cockerels", "Good News", "Walpurgis Night, or The Steps of the Commander". Not literally, but the counterpoint is reflection, the designation of the Christian world order, however, in syncretism with the corporeal, pagan, ancient, we find in the story "At my window". The main purpose of this text, in our opinion, is a relaxed designation of the spectrum of development of society, maybe that's why the story is not completed, since the story continues further along the planned path, ontologically overcoming the actual human actions and actions.

The plot of the story at first glance has a somewhat trivial character, but with slow playback, the narrative increasingly resembles a very qualitatively constructed artistic object focused on three-dimensional semantic sound. The paradoxical nature of the design lies in its harmonious, verified division into parts. These are musical references:

1. Allegro moderato.

2. Andante comodavente.

3. Scratch.

4. The final.

Venedikt Yerofeyev, as a master of the artistic form, regulates the pace of reading in this way, because the increase and intensity are clearly noticeable. The strengthening of the emotional tone partly makes this story related to the lyrical construct. Experiments in the format of poetry in Veins. The Yerofeyevs were, and they were not bad, whole. The "Anthology of poets of the REMSTROYTREST dormitory" ^{[2, pp. 5-15]} confirms this observation. The semantic spectrum is laid down in the strong positions of the text: this is the title, the beginning and the ending of the work. The title of the studied construct had a variant – "At my glass", but the author finally changed it. It can be assumed that "At my window" is more conceptual, more complicated. The "window" frames the entire artistic picture that the main character sees (he is a contemplator of the external plot), and then the reader, "glass" is only a material that does not have a basic aesthetic basis.

Venedikt Yerofeyev is attentive to every detail of the text, perfectionism is somehow achieved to the highest degree. But it is worth saying that the story is not completely completed, although the proper dramatic intrigue is definitely planned. The scheme of emotional fluctuations in the story "At my window" according to the author's installation, if you differentiate the text into parts, plot excuses, is as follows:

1. - moderately soon, moderately fun;

2. - calmly, slowly (comfortably);

3. - Lively, fast paced / joke;

4. - drama, solemnity, monumentality.

Within these limits, a plot plan is built, the basis of the event composition. The beginning of the story manifests: "I very rarely look at the sky, I don't like the sky. If I looked at him casually, it's a sure sign that another wave of hypochondria has washed over me" ^{[2, p. 16]}. The hero of the text deliberately shows his non-involvement in the outside world, that is, only contemplation becomes a variant of comprehending the world order: "in my glorious dead end, the light is extinguished, and, surveying all the celestial spheres in turn from the darkness, I indulge in "metaphysical thinking" ^{[2, p. 16]}. A certain philosophical orientation ^{[3, 4]} has almost always been inherent in the texts of the Veins. Yerofeyeva, small forms are no exception. "At my window" as an artistic object tends to deconstruct the personal principle, this is an objective given. The paradigm of meanings increases at the same time, since the external level is commensurate with the internal, the internal principle complements the transcendental. At the Veins. Yerofeyev even wrote metaphysically correctly in notebooks: "This is what is included in the list of my functions: to see, hate, breathe, hold and drive" ^{[5, p. 159]}. Actually, this is what the hero of the story "At my window" is doing.

The use of irony in the manner of Venedikt Yerofeyev's writing is not excluded. Irony acts as a variant of strengthening postmodern poetics and is verified by the following thesis, one way or another, anticipating the artistic narrative: "my morality is impeccable to bestiality" ^{[2, p. 16]}. The main scene of the plot in this story becomes a "meeting-date" of two third–party characters, who are watched by the main subject of the narrative, he is the main character, he is the mediator, he is the author, who forms the evaluative background of actions. Presenting a figurative series by a spectator of the action, we read: "one of them, apparently– is a sergeant. The other one has its back turned to me, but, as far as the outlines allow, belongs to the Faculty of agro-Biology<ogg>" ^{[2, p. 16]}. The lexical alignment in the description of the meeting by the author, of course, is very textural, stylistically subtle and emotional. There are "kisses", and "close ties", and "nervous anxiety", and "foggy distance". The variant of a romantic character defines genre contamination, while a personal beginning with a spread of artistic types is not excluded. For literature, generalization is perhaps the most important feature. We see this in the texts of I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov, M.A. Sholokhov, L.M. Leonov, A.I. Solzhenitsyn, V.M. Shukshin. A similar principle is not excluded in postmodernism, although the direction clearly tends to the simulative extremes, the periphery, the image of an alienated unknown type of hero.

The playful beginning of the story "At my window" determines a certain dynamic of the actions of both the observer and the participants of the visible date. For a greater intensity of the narrative, the combinatorics of the two extreme evaluative situations is given in a polar way: "two aspects of our existence have long been distinguished – sentimental and practical" ^{[2, p. 17]}. The author distances these events, they cannot be combined into a single whole for him. It should be noted that the artistic idea ^[6] assumes a constructive reception format. The interpretation of the semantic paradigm should probably be variable. This is how the text defines it: "the first includes chrysanthemums, gyurfixes, dreams, kisses..." ^{[2, p. 17]}, "the volume of the second, on the contrary, is almost exhausted by carpool trucks, sanitary passes, passing tax, liver sausage..." ^{[2, p. 17]}. In the story "At my window", a change of actions and actions is organically combined by the author into a natural life, which, subject to artistic embodiment, "as a whole can be considered as some complex act" ^{[7, p. 8]}. The generalization of conditions and assessments is aimed at expanding the semantic field, in this case the semantic link isotopically uneven.

The discursive practice of Venedikt Yerofeyev, using the example of the story "At my Window", assumes obvious ambiguity, in this case not only the situation-the text, it is also an event-perspective, since "bivalence is inherent only in the discourse that takes place in the so-called "archaic" societies, the diffuse mythical ... moment by moment fills our daily social communication" ^{[8, p. 139]}. It seems that it is worth agreeing with this, because the artistic basis of postmodernism is conceptual; the coherence of limits into a kind of counterpoint is justified and expedient: "the concept of arrangement alone is not able to justify anything, like any other concept" ^{[9, p. 96]}. In our opinion, the set of guidelines in the story is multivariate, while external realities do not exclude internal ones, that is, they allow an immanent premise. The textual plane works in the rhythm of living organics, producing semantic connotations, because "a text that expresses nothing is insignificant" ^{[9, p. 41]}.

The compilation of the plot of this story, in principle, does not amount to a pure nomination of events. It is important for the author to emphasize the prolongation of actions, or the prospect of receptions. We believe that the vector of omission in this text is extensive and this fact is justified. Linguistically, this is manifested in models such as: "innate disgust", "life is repugnant to my nature", "The Lord is witty", "violent image", "erotic languor", etc. The expansive background of meanings is supported by the non-specificity of the genre, it is worth noting that this is also characteristic of postmodernism. Genre "modulation" ^{[10, p. 164]} is a necessary component of the search, it was inherent both for ancient authors and for Renaissance poets, it is possible that in the twentieth century, as in Europe (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Franz Kafka, Horce Louis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Albert Camus, James Joyce, Herman Hesse, George Orwell), and Russia (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, Igor Severyanin, Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yuri Olesha, Andrey Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov).

In our opinion, the text of "At my Window" can also be considered within the framework of the tradition of a classic story, but the narrative rhythm is clearly changing, and the emotional intensity increases with the course of the narrative. The associative block shifts to ancient drama, pastoral, and the medieval romantic version, partly to realism in its purest form – an edifying novella, an instructive anecdote. Venedikt Yerofeyev does not compress the canon of the text, of course, the narrative is expanded and complicated. Actually, this attracts the reader. The boundary of semantic redefinitions of even such a small text is not limited to the nomination of something literal and simple. The field of meaning is expanded in the segment of general coherence with ancient literature, texts of the XIX century, works of the XX century. The realized dialogue of related types of narration in Venedikt Yerofeyev's story gives reason to assume that the construct is not so simple for a full-fledged reception at the same time, a full explanation of the semantic significance will obviously not happen. The syncretism of the sound formation, lexical nomination, plotting, and a less literal alignment of roles within the images indicates a parametric reading of this text. The story "At my window" is a kind of experimental prose, which is at the limit of fluctuations of naturalism (this qualification is written by the author reliably and accurately) and postmodernism (craving for simulation, pastiche, play, tendency to default).

The artistic construct "At my window" has the signs of a frame shape. Textual storytelling is transformed into an objective view of what is happening, of the visible story. But: "history is not valuable in itself, it does not and cannot have any social purpose. Her goal is deeply personal and is to let us express ourselves. The role of history is in a certain sense comparable to the role of Rama. And we create the portrait ourselves" ^{[11, p. 191]}. This is what happens within the framework of Venedikt Yerofeyev's story. Both the hero and the heroes of this text are not great, they do not have a certain significance, there is no specific reality. They experience events the way they want, the way they feel comfortable. In this case, the associative series are blurred, the intertextual paradigm is vector, even a partial version of the scheme of events returns to the conditional past. The author-narrator notes: "My life is repugnant to my nature. And if its lyrical side attracts me more than others, it is only because it contains a greater element of comedy" ^{[2, p. 17]}.

The intensity of the characters' passions, the climactic limit of the story correlates with the "slap in the face", which determines the tragic outcome: "I do not know who was the author of this slap, apparently the sergeant, because at the moment he was moving away from the crumbs with visible pleasure..." ^{[2, p. 17]}. The reference to one of the semantic facets is the mention of the so-called "crucified beauty", because "she wandered in the direction of my dead end" ^{[2, p. 17]}. The intertextual background in a number of places is brought to a kind of absolute citation of a direct order: "all progressive humanity, that in relation to each of them ... she adhered to the principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" ^{[2, p. 18]}. The reference to Karl Marx's work is given not so much in ideological terms as in moral and social terms. The version of the artistic generalization of a meeting, a romantic date in the text "At my window" is definitely ambiguous. There is "tragedy", and "naturalness", and "moral plan", and "religious ecstasy". The basic narrative, in principle, ends with the entrance to the foreground of the hero's street, which the author observes: "The front gates opened – and the OZPI dormitory spewed out a boy who was destined to become a new one – and the centrifuge of my lyrical narrative" ^{[2, p. 18]}. Further in the part "ANDANTE" there will already be the author's arguments about the "benefits of alcohol". At the same time, the rhetoric of provocative nominations is sustained in the style of Veins. Erofeeva. For example, "you can talk endlessly about the benefits of alcohol," or "a sober person is so poor spiritually," "alcohol doubles the power," or "in a state of intoxication ... a person behaves naturally," or "ethyl alcohol has replaced ... the Christian God," etc. And this is quite justified, since the literal aesthetic frame is still directed not at reality as such, but at a potential reader interested in probabilistic expansion of the paradigm of connotations. In this case, the orientation towards the present does not interfere, it introduces wholeness and fullness; the nature of the postmodern text is ontologically nonlinear, reading, therefore, must also be multidirectional.

The story "At my window" is incomplete, the plot layer is thought out by the reader, which is extremely interesting, because the fact of co-creation in fiction is necessary. Moreover, there are quite a lot of examples of unfinished texts in literature: these are "Egyptian Nights" by A.S. Pushkin, "The Living Corpse" by L.N. Tolstoy, "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer, "Nights at the Villa" by N.V. Gogol, "Shtoss" by M.Y. Lermontov. In the case of Venedikt Yerofeyev, "the text is lost" ^{[2, p. 20]}; it can be assumed that the idea was nevertheless fully developed by the author, for example, in the mode of the love affair "Daphnis and Chloe" by Long: "young Daphnis has already come close to her and greeted her with sentimental swagger" ^{[2, p. 20]} or other classical text. For Veins. Yerofeyev's mixing of different stylistic layers, the combination of different genres, different plot twists was characteristic, in fact, this defines the new poetics, the poetics of postmodernism.

Thus, the semantic boundaries of the story "At my Window" are expanded due to the special structure of the plot, open and hidden links to the pretexts, direct dialogue with the classics in the mode of intertextuality, as well as experiment at the level of the entire artistic whole. The final quote supports the signs of understatement: "Your goals are unknown, O Lord; and your ways are inscrutable" ^{[2, p. 20]}. However, the search for truth continues for both the author and the reader. The moment of description in this case is leveled, although it becomes the initial impulse, because the main limits of connotations are aimed at the immanent search for the ontological truth of life. The version of Venedikt Yerofeyev's assessment of being is extremely simple, but emotionally correct: "The Lord is witty. He made it so that passing away from life would give a person maximum physical pain, and the conception of a new life would be the greatest of all bodily pleasures" ^{[2, p. 17]}. But the writer cannot exclude irony, in particular over himself: "in such a violent way he shows his concern for the prolongation of the human race..." ^{[2, p. 17]}. The main method of correct evaluation of this story should be the combination of philosophical-historical and literary-critical highways. The syncretic nature of perception generalizes the paradigm of semantic, connotative components. The text is revealed in the obvious potential of the formal and substantive levels of fusion. Venedikt Yerofeyev's story "At my Window" is not only an existing symbolic structure, not only an unfinished aesthetic object, but also an impulsive postmodern standard for the regeneration of a semantic paradigm.