The article is devoted to comparative analysis of works of J. Joyce «A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man», «Ulysses», short story «The Dead» with M. Shishkin’s novel «Pismovnik». Use of plots about artist’s formation, travels, ironical world outlook, elegiac motifs by the abovementioned authors results in a number of similar motifs: course of life as a travel; opposition of eternity to short human life; lost opportunities; predestination and recurrence of human fate; art that overcomes death; assimilation of the creative act to human birth; choosiness and estrangement; word that admits light; interconnection of everything that exists; unity of human and divine principles; omnipresence ofGod; return to origins (nature, femininity), senselessness of history.