The article discusses Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel «The Slynx» which is structured as an «alphabet
novel», with each of its 33 chapters captioned by its own letter of the alphabet. Such alphabetbased
texts, somewhat akin to children’s ABC books, were a relatively common phenomenon
in the 20th century literature. The individual parts of these alphabet- or game card-oriented compositions
were typically quite autonomous and allowed a high degree of variability in the way
they were put together by the author. Such is the case with the individual chapters of «The
Slynx», a «library novel» whose protagonist, Benedict, is a scribe and an avid reader of books.
The novel contains numerous quotes from the Russian poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries which
form an odd poetic wreath inside the prosaic text. For Benedict, the quotes function as an ABC
of the bygone days while the novel’s author uses them as a tool that allows her to rearrange all
kinds of poetic, fairy tale, skaz and linguistic meanings. Such rearrangement produces an unexpectedly
parodic effect and throws new light on the classical texts.
The gaps in the alphabet structure of the novel have a special significance. Thus, while the
chapter titles generally follow the letters of the Old Slavonic alphabet, Tolstaya omits the letter
«zemlja» («earth»). This omission makes sense in the context of the novel’s fantasy plot which
involves a destruction of the land (country, Moscow) by the «Blast» and the «consequences» of
that event which include, first and foremost, its impact on the language. «The Slynx» is a novel
about language and its history, about words and letters, the autonomous essence of each sign
of the alphabet, the fluidity of meaning, the coincidence and divergence of poetic and everyday
usages, and the way words’ meanings change with the passage of time.
The catastrophic plot of the novel includes a poetic subtext that is deliberately emphasized by
the author: namely, it is primarily the poetry of Alexander Blok and Natalia Krandievskaya-
Tolstaya that dominates the novel’s wreath of quotations. As to Blok, the article points out
a number of intertextual features that create a connection between «The Slynx» and Alexey Tolstoy’s
revolutionary novel «The Road to Calvary» in which Blok serves as the prototype for the
poet Bessonov. The motif of the cataclysms of the past (the 1917 revolution, the time of troubles,
the Moscow fires) is overlapped in «The Slynx» with that of the modern-day catastrophe, allowing
the author to collage together the archaic and the futuristic. Equally fascinating are the quotations
from Krandievskaya-Tolstaya. The article discusses two of these which deal with the depictions
of a lion and a mouse and thus echo the novel’s bestiary which includes the two polar
images of the slynx and the mouse.
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