"THE KEYBOARDS OF MEMORY" AND THE SPACE "WHERE DIFFERENCES OF ALL TIMES GO SILENT": FAMILY, PERSONAL, NATIONAL, AND LITERARY HISTORY IN THE POETRY AND "MEMOROMAN" OF ALEKSANDAR PETROV Cover Image

"КЛАВИЈАТУРА ПАМЋЕЊА" И ПРОСТОР "ГДЕ СВИХ ВРЕМЕНА РАЗЛИКЕ ЋУТЕ": ПОРОДИЧНА, ЛИЧНА, НАЦИОНАЛНА И КЊИЖЕВНА ИСТОРИЈА У ПОЕЗИЈИ И "МЕМОРОМАНУ" АЛЕКСАНДРА ПЕТРОВА
"THE KEYBOARDS OF MEMORY" AND THE SPACE "WHERE DIFFERENCES OF ALL TIMES GO SILENT": FAMILY, PERSONAL, NATIONAL, AND LITERARY HISTORY IN THE POETRY AND "MEMOROMAN" OF ALEKSANDAR PETROV

Author(s): Milica V. Ćuković
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Serbian Literature
Published by: Универзитет у Крагујевцу
Keywords: : history;mother;father;Russian emigration;October Revolution;novel; memoir;fiction

Summary/Abstract: The paper shows the shaping and the presence of the elements of family, personal, national, and literary history in Aleksandar Petrov’s poetry (especially in the collection Slovenska škola) and his novel Memoroman. For a hybrid genre, a genre bordering on a novel and memoir, Aleksandar Petrov’s Memoroman is characterized by the combining of fictional elements on one side and memories of real people and events on the other. This paper compared Aleksandar Petrov’s Memoroman to Miloš Crnjanski’s Itaka i komentari, as well as to Aleksandar Petrov’s poetry. The poem„Smoljni” by A. Petrov and the figure of the mother are connected to a chapter in Memoroman in which, through the description of the Institute for Noble Girls„Smoljni” and the description of the migrant destiny of A. Petrov’s mother, Irina Ip- olitovna Karatejev, this description is confronted with tsarist, bourgeois, communist, and Bolshevik Russia, in the same way the fatherly figure from poetry is associated with parts of Memoroman that point to the Mongol, Caucasian, and Asian origin ofA. Petrov. Beside the family history, the Memoroman exhibits elements of personal history, described through erotic and literary coming of age of the author/narrator/ meta-author, while elements of literary history in A. Petrov’s Memoroman analyzed in this paper are foremost related to figures of Miloš Crnjanski, Laza Kostić, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva, who are closely related to a specific sense of time which determined the composition of Memoroman as a „keyboards of memory” in prose.

  • Issue Year: XX/2019
  • Issue No: 70
  • Page Range: 117-128
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: Serbian