Došlo je vrijeme. Pretres Viktora Krivulina
The Time Has Come: Search by Viktor Krivulin

Summary/Abstract: Search (Šmon, 1990), a prose work by the Russian poet Viktor Krivulin (Leningrad,1945), is an example of the stream of consciousness novel in which we – the narrating consciousness (the author is on the margin of the text) – create a Peterburgian text by putting together various narrative conventions, ideologies and historical styles. It includes exchanges simultaneously taking place in various places in Leningrad (kitchen, attic, hallways), thus creating a literary texture in the present that links the exchanges via the »vremja nastupilo« leit motif. By intersecting a plethora of discourses (speeches) the scriptor produces different narrative lines pointing to the simultaneity of historical events in the text and their interdependence on the »zero time« metaphor (»vremja nastupilo«!). Simultanism as a technique is highlighted grammatically (e.g. there are no usual punctuation marks) and graphically (distinctive types for occurrences distant in time within sentences). In her analysis of Krivulin’s novel the author draws attention to the connections between the presented (in writing and »images«) collective historical experience of the Soviet civilization and avant garde poetics, with special attention to the parallelism of the two cultural paradigms of the Russian 20th century (Soviet and Russian, or male and female). It is interesting to note that this novel, initially published in the »Vestnik novoj literatury« almanac, was created in one era (stagnation) and canonized in another (perestroika). The first literary reception of the text took place in the third era (post-Soviet) and in a non-Russian cultural context (Croatia, 1998).

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