"Last summer on the Volga-river" by FR. Gorenstein: experience of the analysis of the story in the context of frontier paradigm

Abstract

The article analyzes a story by the famous Russian writer Friedrich Naumovich Gorenstein (1932–2002). The main character of the story, titled "Last summer on the Volga-river" (1988) is a metropolitan intellectual; he was going to forever leave his country and was making a farewell trip along the river. The story describes his stay in one of the Russian towns; the action takes no more than half a 24-hours of a single day. The events of the story are not related to Frontier transgression processes, but the text often addresses themes of colonization and intercultural dialogue. With all that the author of the article finds a large number of components, characteristic of literature, which tells about the encounter with “the Other”. Among them, a dichotomy between "wild" and "civilized" areas, hostile to the guest environment, primitivization (and sometimes zoomorphism) in the images of the "natives", the quirkiness of the alimentary preferences of the strangers, their sexual perversion, elements of transgressive behavior, and so on. Special attention is paid to the actual writer of the story who too has emigrated. At the conclusion the article discusses a number of related problems, such as to the problem of "Self-Other", the idea of "professional" Russians, the theory of the existence of "rooted" and "rootless" people, and symbolism associated with these aspects. The author of the article  believes that though her our approach is unusual, the results show, it is quite perspective and  has a scientific value.