Postmodernist Features in W. Gerhardie’s Novel “The Polyglots”
The article investigates the literary legacy of William Gerhardie, an Anglo-Russian novelist, whose works receive diametrically opposite reviews. Some give him ample praise, while others criticize his books for having neither artistic nor ideological merit. The aim of the article is to explore “The Polyglots”, W. Gerhardie’s famous novel about Russian civil war through the lens of postmodernist aesthetics and postmodernist worldview. W. Gerhardie’s novel is a prime example of 20th century literature with its conceptual unity and artistic synthesis. The article analyzes such postmodernist features of “The Polyglots” as epistemological doubt, metanarrative critique, perception of the world as something uncontrollably chaotic, non-hierarchical principle, destruction of binary oppositions, gaming essence, deconstruction, neobaroque worldview, intertextulaity, multigenre characteristics. Special attention is given to the analysis of the protagonist, the narrator of the story, whose consciousness glues together the random pieces of the mosaic of life and, being flexible and unstable, adds ambiguity, which is another postmodernist characteristic. One more postmodernist feature of the work is its metanarrative character. “The Polyglots” is a novel about a novel, a novel about the writing process. The article focuses on the influence of the Russian culture on Gerhardie’s artistic worldview, his ironic postmodernist interpretation of Russian writers’ literary legacy.