Features of narrative organization in novel “Armageddon” by Genrikh Sapgir

Abstract

The article examines the narrative organization of Armageddon, a novel written by Genrikh Sapgir in 1998. In the Soviet cultural space, most of Genrikh Sapgir’s prose texts were published as underground manuscripts for a long time (as a samizdat phenomenon) and have become known to the modern reader relatively recently. Armageddon, which is of scientific interest due to its intermedial origin, is a unique precedent of Russian literature based on a special technique of working with artistic material – montage – borrowed from cinematographic art. The authors use the semiotic, narrative, and intertextual analysis methods to conclude that such an approach, which allows characterizing Armageddon as a phenomenon of cinematographic literary text, forms a specific type of narrative organization, consisting in the active change of focalization, the dynamism of spatiotemporal transformations, and the unstable position of instance subjects. The creation of Armageddon was significantly influenced by The Demons, a political novel written by F. M. Dostoevsky. Genrikh Sapgir integrates the component of understatement and unpredictability of events into the story to question the narrator’s reliability and awareness, which correlates with the postmodernist aesthetics of the author’s prose characterized by demy thologization, deconstruction of the artistic text, and a decrease in the authority of the subject of the narrative.