Optical effects of the poet’s prose. Vecheslav Kazakevich

Abstract

Y. Shestakova’s article looks into the literary techniques of the contemporary writer V. Kazakevich. Having immigrated to Japan, Kazakevich repeatedly cites his early autobiographical experiences to reconstruct his life in the USSR: he is convinced that children have the best tools to understand the encounters of the mundane and the eternal. It is for this reason that he extensively uses sensory descriptions, typical of the child’s perceptive view of the world. Throughout his writing career, Kazakevich will work to expand and intensify the range of such descriptions, from casual observations in the predominantly narrative discourse at the beginning of his story A Hunt for Maybugs [Okhota na mayskikh zhukov] to the comprehensive associative ornament in his book A Unicorn Will Come Get Me [Za mnoy pridyot edinorog] (2016). Following analysis of Kazakevich’s works in the context of ornamental prose by the 20th c. Modernists (I. Bunin, V. Nabokov,  and I. Shmelyov), Y. Shestakova opines that it is thanks to a combination of the classical and Modernist traditions that the author succeeds in creating artistically convincing prose about childhood.