Semiotics of the Train in Russian Literature: Intermedial and Metapoetical Aspects

This article explores the intermedial and metapoetical semantics of the artistic image of a train. This image is part of the artistic semiotics and plays two interrelated roles: it marks the connection between the discourses of cinema and literature and signifies the act of artistic creation. Based on the Russian literature of the ХХ–ХХI century, this article reviews the origins and development of the arrival of a train as a cinematic metaphor, as well as the ways of depicting images in time and space (including the inner space). Before the age of cinema, the classic Russian literature introduced the railroad motif to make the discourse more dynamic and to highlight the key opposition between traditional lifestyle and technological progress, e.g. in works by F. Ostrovsky, A. Chekhov, etc. The literature of the XX century merged cinematic devices with literary motifs and introduced fragmentation, editing, changing angles, and other new ways of artistic perception, e.g. in A. Platonov’s oeuvre. Train imagery may attain mythological semantics when it manifests the themes of disaster, death, Apocalypse, and revolution, thus becoming a metapoetical symbol, e.g. in B. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In the contemporary Russian literature, train movement is associated with the life of human consciousness (V. Pelevin) or with text generation (S. Sokolov). In some cases, episodes of rail traffic interspersed with episodes of filming complicate the narrative and multiply transitions from external to internal focalization (E. Vodolazkin). 

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