The surrealist urban poetics in Serge Charchoune's novel “The right road”

The way of representing the image of a city in a writer’s works often becomes an object of literary studies. The urban scenery in the literary works at the turn of the 20th century bears the imprint of a new perception of culture, and undergoes further transformation in the literature of avant-garde. In the first half of the 20th century Paris became one of the cultural centres of the Russian writers abroad, as well as a meeting-point of the Russian and West-European traditions. The works of Serge Charchoune reflect various influences and represent a fusion of the dominant trends of the European avant-garde with his Russian background. His susceptibility to everything new, his openness to experiments, and his interest to automatic writing brought him close to the Dadaists and made of him an active figure of Surrealism. Charchoune’s novel “The Right Road” allows us not only to reveal multiple intertextual references to André Breton’s narrative “Nadja”, but also to find similarities in the description of Paris given by both authors. The paper aims at revealing “the surrealist perception of the city” in Serge Charchoune’s novel “The Right Road”. As a result of the analysis, the author highlights the features typical of the avant-garde literature in general, namely, estrangement, the primacy of a subjective perception of reality, and the address to the irrational.