Intertextuality in Pavel Ulitin’s «Hopeless journey»

The article presents an overview of the main ideas of modern researchers and literary scholars about the cultural and stylistic features of the prose of the cult writer of the 1980s Pavel Ulitin. The purpose of the article is to analyze some manifestations of interteхtuality in Pavel Ulitin’s book «Hopeless Journey» and to characterize the style-forming functions of this phenomenon. Intertextual units (allusions, reminiscences, quotes, references) are an integral part of the text. The following types of intertextual units were found during the analysis: transformed and untransformed quotations, reminiscences, and allusions. Intertextual units include names of films, musical and literary works, periodicals, quotations from poems, and other literary texts by Russian and foreign writers. In the article, we consider the role of quotations, reminiscences, and allusions, manifested on the semantic, artistic, and stylistic levels. Numerous intertextual units show the cultural and historical context and give multifacetedness to the author’s monologue. They express the most different ideas without voicing them directly. These peculiarities make Ulitin’s prose hard to understand but very multifaceted and challenging to analyze.