Chronotope of the city in detective novels by N. Svechin

Annotation

The aim of the article is to identify the key features of the city chronotope in the detective cycle about Alexei Lykov by the contemporary Nizhny Novgorod novelist N. Svechin. The following research methods were used: comparative-historical, typological, method of holistic analysis of the artwork. As a result, it was established that the uniqueness of Nizhny as a city-organism, a city-labyrinth is embodied in “Avvakum’s Testament”, “The Hunt for the Tsar” and “Chronicles of the Investigation”. In “Avvakum’s Testament” the chronotope of the city is narrowed down to the chronotope of the fair, which appears as a "city in the city" and is embodied by the synthesis of chronicle and everyday time and calendar time, as well as the everyday space of the fair. Artistic space and time play a plot-forming role in the text. It is “Avvakum’s Testament” that opens the “Nizhny Novgorod” texts in the cycle (“The Hunt for the Tsar” and “Chronicles of the Investigation”), in which the spatial component is not only the background for the unfolding of detective collisions, but also the semantic centre, the catalyst of plot unfolding. In the novel “The Hunt for the Tsar”, the events in which chronologically begin to develop in 1880, the main action also takes place in Nizhny Novgorod, although the climax in the plot unfolding is conjugated with the chronicle and everyday time (February 1881) and the locus of the Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky. In all the novellas of the detective collection “Chronicles of Detective Investigation” there is a combination of distant and near (the time of personal destinies is inscribed in the historical one) in temporal terms, in spatial terms - small (house) and large (Nizhny Novgorod, province, Russia) chronotopes. The novelistic form allows us to give a private case a universal meaning: specific events, the central action in this or that story is juxtaposed with the hero's life, with the time of history, the era of “great reforms”.

Keywords

N. Svechin, modern Russian prose, detective cycle, city chronotope, locus, chronotope.

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