Intertextual Aspects of Ilya Boyashov’s “The Way of Muri”

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to trace the literary genealogy of the cat character in Ilya Boyashov’s story “The Way of Muri” (2007). The starting point for reflection was the name of a cat wandering around Europe in Boyashov’s work, which unwittingly causes many readers to associate it with one of the canonical works of German literature: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel “The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr” (1819–1821). In addition to the resemblance of names, both texts reveal a number of textual coincidences. For those who are familiar with Slovenian literature, the name of the cat will inevitably also remind of the character in the work of Kajetan Kovič, which belongs to the classics of children’s literature in Slovenian – the cat Muri from the book “Muri the Cat” (“Maček Muri”, 1975). Ilya Boyashov’s comments to his work, quoted in the article, contained in a letter addressed to the authors of the article, show the fallacy of the initial hypotheses of intertextual analysis, and expose its problematics in general. The writer denies the influence of Hoffmann and Kovič on his text and reports that he endowed his character with the name of the beloved cat of the philosopher N.A. Berdyaev. The second part of the article contains a comparative analysis of three cat characters in literature (Hoffmann’s Murr, cat Muri of Boyashov, and Muri of Ković). Their function for the representation of “Own” / “Other” / “Strange” is considered. If Kovič depicts feline characters as predominantly anthropomorphic creatures, then in Hoffmanns and Boyashovs stories they appear “other” or “strange”, in many ways signifying a human’s isolation from nature, his solipsism, the inability to go beyond his experience, to see, hear, perceive the world through the eyes of another living being. The tragic awareness of such limitations largely determines the culture of modernism.