Genre Features of the Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Granach “Here Comes a Man” in the Context of the Semiotics of Space

Abstract

Alexander Granach, a famous actor of the German scene of the interwar period, whose childhood and early adolescence passed in Galicia at the turn of the XIX-th and XX-th centuries, completes the writing of his biography in American emigration. His premature death didn't allow the author to see published this work, which he called by a dynamic metaphor “Here Comes a Man”. The publisher, preparing the text for printing, subtitles it as “Novel about life”, which seems to outline its genre. The combination of the two definitions, namely “description of life”, as pointing on factual retrospective story of Granach, and “novel” as an allusion to the text fiction indicates the genre features of work, written on the verge of autobiography and literature. The proximity of an autobiographic story of Granach to literature is also in its genetic connection with the novel by Karl Emil Franzos “The Jester”. In the work of Franzos and in Granach's autobiography an opposition between two spaces of culture becomes central: the East, embodied in the Jewish world of Galicia, and the West, primarily the world of German culture. In an attempt to describe this event in autobiographical novel by Granach helps the reference to narrative theory of the plot and the semiotics of space of Yuri Lotman, which essence lies in structuring the world using binary opposition between the two spaces, separated by the border, which cannot be overcome. Given the fact that overcoming the real and ideal limits develops the structure of Granach's text, Lotman's pattern testifies its particular performance. The knowledge about the course of events that connect space with action, enables to outline the spatial pattern of this opposition, to identify the central event in the text and, therefore, to ask a question about a feature of the plot, which answer will help to determine the location of Granach's autobiographical novel in the circle of genre paradigms.