Verbal, visual and sound languages of ontology cognition in Matisse by A. Ilichevsky
A. Ilichevsky's Matisse novel (2007) analysis represents an important intention of modern literature in comprehension of links between texts and ontology: a) existence and essence of extra-text (extra-mental) reality; b) possibility of comprehension by the person of the surrounding reality (border of this knowledge, stability of the picture of the world, the existential importance of the person's understanding of the place in life and in the concrete environment); c) means of embodiment of the mental picture of the world - the sound, visual images and signs, the word. Ilichevsky's novel follows the principles of a realistic narration: destinies of three outcasts of post-Soviet Russia (a scholar - an ordinary person - an oligophrenic female) are given as a manifestation of a forced refusal of social and civilizational norms accepted as a truer way of existence. The second genre model of Ilichevsky's novel is a travel (vagrancy) novel, overcoming of the socially determined knowledge and reaching the anthropological status of the person as a form of transformation of the matter. Showing the need of empirical contact of the person with the reality, Ilichevsky starts from the Rousseau's concept of return to the natural person, proves the inevitability of reaching the mental comprehension of the reality. The modern civilization (physics) gave knowledge to the splitting matter, the bifurcation of forms of the matter, the entropy of transformation of the material into the non-material (energy). The modern consciousness approached the archaic mythological picture of the world as a stream of transformations, however, it lost the idea of the eternity of repetitions. Ilichevsky puts forward a hypothesis of the significance of the being, semantism of the material and metaphysical worlds expressing their own meanings, which the person should comprehend: sounds, light and colours, landscapes and fragments of the breaking matter in the terrestrial thickness can help to form the world picture. The individual hears the ''life call'' (M. Heidegger) and transfers the perception phenomena into signs. Ways of transfer of signs of the being in texts are analysed in the novel making the novel a postmodernist meta-novel about the creation of texts about the world. Different ways of self-positioning in the reality of own life are represented by characters: life recomposition in fantasy stories (by bum Vadya); abstract account as a way of introduction of life phenomena in the whole (retarded Nadia); search of ways of text-formation from scientific formulas to the empirical contact with the breaking matter, to their depicting and verbalising (Korolyov). The static signs of texts permanently lose similarity and original sense of the designated reality, but allow to collect the breaking forms into the schematic whole. Literature corresponds to fixing the transformations of phenomena, and distances itself from the changing sense.