From Kyiv to Brisbane: Evgenii Vodolazkin’s reflections on spiritual identity in the context of space
From Kyiv to Brisbane: Evgenii Vodolazkin’s reflections on spiritual identity in the context of space

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with cultural identification and perception of space in the novel Brisbane(2018, Eng. trans. 2022) by Evgenii/Eugene Vodolazkin. The writer presents controversialproblems of Russian and Ukrainian relations placing the question of cultural identificationof the hero in the centre of his reflections. Despite the fact that the novel depicts many importantevents from the history of today’s Ukraine, in some sense showing the author’s attitudeto them, the core of Vodolazkin’s narration is to expose the issue of particular cultural formation,created in the period of medieval Rus, whose spiritual capital was located in Kyiv. Employingthe methods of contemporary research in terms of the geopoetics of place, this article scrutinizesmany structural elements of the novel, which as an effect of reading in special code opensthe field for analyses of such problems as autobiographical place, symbol of the home, oppositionof space and place, and descriptions of the landscape. This study makes it possible to concludethat places depicted in Vodolazkin’s work define the hero not only in the geographical aspect butmainly in the spiritual one, as a man who belongs to the world of Kyivan Rus culture and whofinds signposts for understanding complicated questions of the present in the enduring medieval worldview.

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