“Song of a falcon” in Eugene Klyuyev's novel “Between two chairs”: on the absurdist texts typology

The article discusses the peculiarities of using discourse analysis to characterize an absurdist text based on the citation device, employing the story-within-story in E. Klyuyev’s novel Between Two Chairs. The authors regard discourse analysis as methodology most adequate for analyzing absurdist texts, in which the external text structure can be derived only from internal semantic representations. However, in case of the literature of the absurd, we deal not merely with the ascent from language structures to the surface level. It is the language level itself that allows us to consider the process of semantization as sense-formation is blocked at any other level. The articles argues that it is impossible to reconstruct the narrative without linguistic analysis. The absurdist character of E. Klyuyev’s “Song of a Falcon” is confirmed by the compositional arrangement as well. In the novel all the chapters multiplied by three have their story-within-story of folklore character in the end, which, according to the author of the novel, are examples of the absurd. This, as it were, equates folklore tales with Maxim Gorky’s well-known text. Gorky’s being found in this semantic series, the original text begins to be perceived in a different light, acquiring a certain amount of absurdity. Maxim Gorky’s text in E. Klyuev’s novel Between Two Chairs is built up to become a model absurdist text and does not fit into any known classification of secondary texts. This is a cento writing technique, it is a cento: passages taken from the disintegrated original text are put together randomly. However, the cento presupposes citing at least two texts. Nor is it a citation text in which one text starts a dialogue with the author’s text. The authors come to the conclusion that the classification of absurdist and secondary texts is inadequate and can be expanded by introducing another type of text - the absurdist parody, entirely combinatorial and game-based.