Art Quintessence of Prague Emigrant’s Experience in Novel “Tundra” by Eugene Liatsky

Abstract

The article treats one of the first samples of description of a tragical way of life of the emigrant environment in Prague post-revolutionary years: “Tundra. A Novel from Refugee Life” (1925). The author, Eugene Liatsky (1868–1942), was a writer of Belarus origin, a philologist, the expert of the eastern Slavic languages, one of key figures of Russian Prague emigration. He was known yet in pre-revolutionary Russia by his varied scientific, educational and publishing activity: as the publisher of magazine “Fires”, the researcher of I. Goncharov’s work, as well as of epistolary heritage of separate raznochinetz writers. E. Liatsky participated in Prague Russian emigration’s life‚ wrote poetry and prose‚ arranged literary anthologies‚ was the author and the co-author of Russian textbooks on wide base. The novel by its structure and poetics is connected with classical tradition of Russian prose of the second half of the 19th century; however there are also poetics groundworks of Russian modernism (heterogeneity of the text‚ complicatedness of a plot‚ introduction of publicism in a novelistic substance‚ aggressive enrichment of the dictionary). On art speech level the tradition is enriched functionally with new lexical layers. “Tundra” is original tragic novel about the end of old Russia.