The Narrative Organization in the Mini Novel ‘Singapore’ by Genrikh Sapgir

Abstract

The article studies the features of the narrative organization of the novel Singapore written by Genrikh Sapgir, one of the key authors of the Russian literary process in the second half of the 20th century. Known to a wide range of readers primarily as the author of poems for children, Genrikh Sapgir also created a significant corpus of prose texts characterized by a multi-layered organization of the narrative, a change in narrative optics. The study focuses on the analysis of the focalization features of the novel, its system of narrative instances and subjective organization, which is determined by the presence of an active, grammatically expressed narrating ‘I’. The authors come to the conclusion that the narrator often sees an illogical world, the inconsistency of which is expressed in the artistic space by plot-related, compositional, or linguistic deformations. The spatiotemporal transformations that determine the temporal mode of the novel directly express the component of partial randomness of the narrative's chain of events, realized by the ‘probabilistic’ picture of the world. In this regard, the absurdist aesthetics and exoticism, which permeate all levels of the work, largely determine the poetics of the mini novel Singapore, with the narrator's explication in the narrative being part of an artistic strategy that assumes a close, autobiographical fusion with his character. This strategy is also realized in the anagrammatic title of the novel (Singapore – Sapgir) and situational visual-graphic experiments with the arrangement of the text on the page, consisting in the formation of semiotic ‘voids’, which is primarily characteristic of Sapgir's poetics as a poet.