The Theme of Homecoming in the Prose of N. N. Berberova

• Main Author: Marina Albertovna Khatyamova
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Ural Federal University Press 2019-12-01
• Series: Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки
• Subjects: литература русского зарубежья; младшее поколение первой волны эмиграции; н. н. берберова; идея возвращения; образы советских людей.
• Online Access: https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/Izvestia2/article/view/4305

This article considers a relevant issue connected with the first wave of Russian emigrants returning to their homeland in the works of N. N. Berberova, a representative of the younger generation of writers. The theme of return and images of the Soviet people are studied with reference to The Billancourt Manuscript from the cycle The Billancourt Tales (1930) and the novel The Last and the First (1929). The analysis of the narrative structure of the story The Billancourt Manuscript, which has a two-level organisation (description of the funeral of a friend of the narrator’s and reading his handwritten novel about his return to his homeland, Soviet Russia, the chronotope of a trip to the “dead” city and the author/main character’s meetings with relatives — Soviet people), reveals Berberova’s dystopian position as regards the idea of return, as well as aesthetic reflection on the tasks of émigré literature and the work as a “human document”. Return as “catching” of emigrant souls organised by the Soviet government in the novel The Last and the First is analysed in connection with the story of resettlement of ordinary immigrants to the French province of Provence. Pochvennichestvo in its basis, coming from the Slavophiles and Dostoevsky, the idea of spiritual salvation on earth, perceived not religiously, had a social, cultural, and generational meaning for the novice writer and was opposed to the utopia of return. The images and behaviour of the Soviet “catchers of souls”, the Kellerman father and son, unnecessarily bodily, focused on material benefits, unscrupulous, soulless, insidious, represent variants of new Soviet politicians, free from kinship and friendship, patriotism and compassion for their compatriots.