Research project
Scholarship for Master's Students — Anna Ustyakina
The competition winner is Anna Ustyakina, a master's student at the European University at St. Petersburg, with the topic: "Jewish Loci in Pavel Zaltsman's Novel 'Puppies'."
The work of Pavel Zaltsman (1912–1985) can be situated at the intersection of such significant phenomena as Russian avant-garde (Zaltsman studied in Pavel Filonov's workshop) and the OBERIU group. His novel Puppies (1930–1982), dedicated to the Civil War, has a complex structure — both at the level of language and composition. At first glance, the text resembles a collage of stylistically diverse fragments, extreme close-ups, and recursively unfolding events. The structure of this complex, multi-layered text is the very subject of the research. The primary goal is to use the tools of narratology, particularly the concept of the "observer," to examine the choice of point of view and locus within the context of the novel's structure.
Zaltsman's novel equalizes different spatial loci — fr om Rybnitsa to Leningrad. The fifth part of the book shifts the setting to a farmstead near Chișinău, which can be seen as a representation of a Jewish shtetl. The third and fourth parts of the novel take place in Rybnitsa — a typical Transnistrian shtetl in Podolia Governorate. For Zaltsman, however, the landscape is a semantically charged part of the text. Geographical markers referring to specific facts of reality, embedded within a text that often prevents us fr om even saying precisely what we see or wh ere we are, can become a kind of "talisman" or key. Through these markers, the meanings of scenes are meant to unfold — scenes wh ere the perceiving subject is someone with a limited ability to orient themselves in the world, such as a hare or a blind person.
Zaltsman's novel equalizes different spatial loci — fr om Rybnitsa to Leningrad. The fifth part of the book shifts the setting to a farmstead near Chișinău, which can be seen as a representation of a Jewish shtetl. The third and fourth parts of the novel take place in Rybnitsa — a typical Transnistrian shtetl in Podolia Governorate. For Zaltsman, however, the landscape is a semantically charged part of the text. Geographical markers referring to specific facts of reality, embedded within a text that often prevents us fr om even saying precisely what we see or wh ere we are, can become a kind of "talisman" or key. Through these markers, the meanings of scenes are meant to unfold — scenes wh ere the perceiving subject is someone with a limited ability to orient themselves in the world, such as a hare or a blind person.
Image: Pavel Zaltsman, "Habitat", 1934 (URL: https://www.pavelzaltsman.org/paintings-drawings/leningrad-period/drawings/).
The research is carried out with the financial support of A. Klyachin.