Хронотоп vs. гетеротопия (на примере повести Метель Владимира Сорокина)
Chronotope vs. Heterotopia (on Vladimir Sorokin’s Novel The Blizzard)

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, we analyze chronotope (Bakhtin) in Sorokin’s novel The Blizzard (2010). District doctor Platon Ilyich Garin must reach the village of Dolgoye, and he travels with Perkhusha on his “scooter“. They travel from village Dolbeshino to village Dolgoye in winter, because doctor Garin carries a vaccine that will prevent the spread of a terrible disease “chernuha“. On the road they face obstacles (small pyramid, wolfs, snow drifts, dead giant). The novel can be read as a chronotope of the road. Besides the classic, travel heroes go in “other” spaces of hallucination and dreams that we call heterotopias (Foucault). Particularly important is Perkhusha’s last dream, which becomes his death. Perkhusha’s death explains the motto in the beginning of the text – four lines of Alexander Blok’s verse about soul’s departure to heaven. In the text we are following Foucault’s thesis on “other spaces” and Freud’s thesis on dreams as regression and wish fulfilment. Both heroes in Sorokin’s novel dream about the past and in the oneiric state, they fulfill wishes they can’t in the real state (cold – warm). In the conclusion, the text describes three space levels. The first space is a real space of travel from Dolbeshino village to Dolgoye village . The second space (heterotopia) is a space of hallucination and dreams, and, at last, the third space is an unknown space where doctor Garin goes (rescued by a few Chinese people) and where Perkhusha goes (he freezes and goes to the unknown space for living people). We called that third space “overheterotopia”.

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