The double code of Zakhar Prilepin’s prose. On Prilepin’s Dogs and Other People [Sobaki i drugie lyudi] (2023)

Abstract

In her analysis of Zakhar Prilepin’s collections of short stories, Dogs and Other People [Sobaki i drugie lyudi], and in search of the author’s principal artistic communication strategies, the critic discovers that Prilepin’s method is best described in terms of G. Bateson’s concept of ‘double bind.’ Bateson’s theory concerns receiving conflicting messages within a single act of communication. Similarly, while eliciting an almost exclusively enthusiastic reaction from critics and readers alike, the book remains a profoundly terrifying piece of writing. Gaping wounds, broken bones, flesh and gore, and cruelty and pain determine the book’s emotional spectrum. Zhuchkova notes that, just as in his earlier works, Prilepin employs the technique of swinging between extremes and alternating outbursts of intense emotions: bloodshed and sentimentality, brutality and tenderness, and crudity and childishness. On top of that, the book is rich in semantic interruptions, or gaps, that at once help disguise an uncomfortable truth and leave room for the reader’s creative imagination which might justify the first-person narrator’s behaviour and his treatment of dogs.