Od kulturowego pojmowania przestrzeni ku rozważaniom o wieczności. Dyskurs przestrzenny w powieści Brisbane Jewgienija Wodołazkina

Abstract

This article deals with different aspects of space in the text of Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Brisbane as well as in its studies and reception. Successive parts of the research are devoted to lieux de mémoire in autobiographical fiction, cultural understanding of the space of the home and places which traditionally create the image of Kiev and the individual mythology of this city. Space perceived in the way modified by culture is a certain frame in which both the hero of Vodolazkin lives and a receiver reads the novel. It is also an important component of the work’s internal structure, the factor responsible for certain genre associations that determine the direction of the reading process. In all these forms of functioning, space is thematically related to the reflection on death. The author concludes that the understanding of space leads to the rejection of the physical future and the affirmation of eternity understood in a religious way, in line with medieval tradition.

From Kyiv to Brisbane: Evgenii Vodolazkin’s reflections on spiritual identity in the context of space

“…The novel Brisbane, in which the writer most clearly uses this part of his life experience, includes, among other things, very important events in the history of modern Ukraine, for example the so-called "Revolution of Dignity" (Revoliutsiia hidnosti) in 2014, but also other stories set in many other places, related in some way to the author's biography. The novel in question has repeatedly attracted the attention of researchers dealing with imagological, xenological, and mythopoetic issues (Manchev 2021;Grimova 2020;Nogawica 2019;Sidor 2021). The approach used in the present considerations is different, not because it uses some completely new category, but because it proposes a shift of emphasis that makes it possible to see phenomena on the periphery of other discourses.…”