Этническая травестия в романе Давида Маркиша „Белый круг”
Ethnic travesty in David Markish’s novel “The White Circle”

Summary/Abstract: The author tries to explain the riddle presented in the novel by the modern writer David Markish, The White Circle, about the ethnic identity of the character Matvey Katz, whose prototype is the avantgarde artist Sergey Kalmykov (1891–1967). The name and lifestyle of this artist became the reason for the birth of a personal myth, which formed the basis of the novel semi-detective plot. If in the discourse of the second half of the XX century and in the XXI century (mythology, cinema, a number of literary texts), Sergey Kalmykov, a Russian by origin, appears as a half-mysterious, half-mad person, an Alma-Ata freak, but under his real name, then, in Markish’s novel, he is a Russian artist of “Jewish origin”, living in the fictitious Central Asian topos named Kzylgrad. To explain the ethnic travesty that runs counter to historical reality, to “decipher” the location of the novel associated with the last years of the artist’s life are the tasks solved by the author of the article.

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