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

Year, pages: 2023, 47 - 57

This article deals with cultural identification and perception of space in the novel Brisbane (2018, Eng. trans. 2022) by Evgenii/Eugene Vodolazkin. The writer presents controversial problems of Russian and Ukrainian relations placing the question of cultural identification of the hero in the centre of his reflections. Despite the fact that the novel depicts many important events from the history of today’s Ukraine, in some sense showing the author’s attitude to them, the core of Vodolazkin’s narration is to expose the issue of particular cultural formation, created in the period of medieval Rus, whose spiritual capital was located in Kyiv. Employing the methods of contemporary research in terms of the geopoetics of place, this article scrutinizes many structural elements of the novel, which as an effect of reading in special code opens the field for analyses of such problems as autobiographical place, symbol of the home, opposition of space and place, and descriptions of the landscape. This study makes it possible to conclude that places depicted in Vodolazkin’s work define the hero not only in the geographical aspect but mainly in the spiritual one, as a man who belongs to the world of Kyivan Rus culture and who finds signposts for understanding complicated questions of the present in the enduring medieval worldview.

Sidor, M. 2023. From Kyiv to Brisbane: Evgenii Vodolazkin’s reflections on spiritual identity in the context of space. In World Literature Studies, vol. 15, no.1, pp. 47-57. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.1.4

Sidor, M. (2023). From Kyiv to Brisbane: Evgenii Vodolazkin’s reflections on spiritual identity in the context of space. World Literature Studies, 15(1), 47-57. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.1.4

Publisher: Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, v. v. i.