Yuri Levitansky’s screenplays: between the narrative and the performative

Abstract

The article examines elements of film poetics in Yuri Levitansky’s metalyric poetry. Drawing on texts whose title complexes contain the genre designation “Screenplay Fragments” (“The Time of Blind Rains,” “The Time of Departing Birds,” “The Time of Winter Blizzards,” and “The Time of Unfolding Leaves”) and references to a director’s actions (“How to Show Summer,” “How to Show Autumn,” “How to Show Spring,” and “How to Show Winter”), the study identifies the principles governing the narrativization of performative utterance.

The lyrical subject assumes the role of a director who creates the world according to his own screenplay and reinterprets his life. Through the lyrical subject’s frames of mental vision, the reader is drawn into the process of creating and comprehending the text, whether a lyrical work, a screenplay, or a film.

In Levitansky’s non-authorial lyrical cycle, narrative representation is modeled through the segmentation of the visible world into shots. This mode of narrative organization may be described as a quasi-narrative: a sequence of changing shots in place of an extended narrative, together with fragmentation and incompleteness.