Return from exile: Pankratiy Sumarokov's experience

This article takes a look at the 1801-1810 documentary and literary works and, for the first time, reconstructs P.P. Sumarokov’s experience of returning from exile. P.P. Sumarokov was a poet, translator, and editor who spent fourteen years (1787-1801) of his life in Siberia. His return from exile is considered as a liminal situation, a biographical event and a system of motives. The study is based on a comparative analysis of the system of motives for his return from exile in the document “Petition of Pankratiy Platonovich Sumarokov to the Highest Name for a Restoration in his Estate and Property Rights” (1801) and the writer’s literary works. The integrative research methodology comprises a motivational analysis of the ‘return-from-exile’ texts, biographical analysis, and interpretation of A. van Gennep’s rites of passage. The author argues that, in the “return-from-exile” texts, his exile is connected with the motives of home as an external and internal living space; suffering/tears/injuries as well as with the situation of “creativity as salvation” based on the bibliophilic cultural myth of the Enlightenment. The return-from-exile plot is represented by three main motives: home (the loss of the Siberian and the creation of a new family estate), transformation (metamorphosis), and renewal/novelty. It is established that Sumarokov’s “inclusion” in the new order of life upon the end of exile meant recreation of the creativity forms (magazines, translated novels, poems, books on the art of living) he was engaged in in Siberia and critical rethinking of the bibliophilic cultural myth: in a liminal situation “between books and life”, creation of his own life outweighed creative writing.