Between the issues of the day and the transcendent. Gayto Gazdanov: from autobiographism to metanarration

Abstract

In 1920, a sixteen-year-old G. Gazdanov boarded a steamboat, forever leaving the country where he had spent his childhood but was denied a chance to grow to young adulthood. He entered Russian literature by drawing on his painful existential experience. In his first novel An Evening with Claire [Vecher u Kler ] (1930), the autobiographical memory evoking the lost ancestral home and the metaphysical ‘inner person’ acquires the mode of an autonomous spiritual resource. The novel’s composition emerges from a combination of three virtual worlds — a ‘childhood world’ in the Caucasus, a fratricidal civil war, and Paris as the émigré’s final frontier. The article considers two phases in Gazdanov’s literary career — before and after World War II. The author finds that Gazdanov’s transition to the material based on his experiences of living in France (Europe) in his later prose comes from the increasing openness to the world, intersubjectivity, and self-sufficiency of this cross-cultural individual placed at the confluence of diverse cultural traditions (Russian, French, and Ossetian).