IN VIA VERITAS. IRINA BOGATYREVA

Abstract

In this review of the novels and stories by the contemporary Russian author I. Bogatyreva, winner of numerous literary awards, including The Student Booker 2016, the critic highlights the principal motifs of her plots, including the motif of travel, pilgrimage, and the search of a certain human common ground: be it age, philosophy, or nationality. The paper also examines the chronotope and the writer’s use of mythological allusions, which permeate both her historical and modern day-based novels, only to conclude that ‘emerging adulthood’, a term from the psychological studies of young adults, is the most apt way to describe Bogatyreva’s prose. That the writer maintains keen interest in the subject is not only because of her role as ‘a real master of innovation in young Russian prose’ (quoted from the blurb on the cover of her prize-winning novel Kadyn), but due to its relevance for contemporary young adult readers, themselves in search of their models growing up and their future destiny.