ИЕРУСАЛИМ КАК ГОРОД МИРОВОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ: БОРХЕС И ЗИНГЕР
JERUSALEM AS THE CITY OF WORLD LITERATURE: BORGES AND SINGER

Summary/Abstract: For Russian-Israeli literature, the city of Jerusalem is a “medium” of multiple realities and mean- ings. Some authors view it as an eternal city immersed in biblical stories, while others see it as a multidimen- sional universe of mythical and real, historical and legendary. Nekod Singer, in his novel Drafts of Jerusalem (Черновики Иерусалима, 2013), created his own Jerusalem — a city-universe of world literature, a city of “an infinite book of culture that encompasses all texts.” It may seem that by constructing a model of the universe reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel, Singer is participating in a postmodernist game, the goal of which is to show that “statement as such is an empty process” (Barthes), that cultural texts have long been written. All that remains is to ironize over the impossibility of breaking through to the “transcendental signi- fied” (Derrida) and to engage in endless interpretations of one text through another. This paper aims to demon- strate the fallacy of such a judgment. By pretending to be a postmodernist, Singer is actively arguing against it, as well as against Borges’ “Library of Babel,” by constructing his own concept of the Draft as a mythopoetic generator of meanings and ideas, demonstrating the possibility of overcoming the crisis of culture.

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