“The Mediterranean War” by Andrei Levkin: The words of a language on the borders of silence

Abstract

Throughout the 20^th century, under the influence of the preceding tradition, the line that once clearly divided the artistic and the so-called “non-artistic” reality, various arts, literature for experts and for all, poetry and prose, genres and figures in literary works was getting blurred. This statement is now inherent to the standard repertoire of studies in contemporary culture. Yet, no one has given a definitive answer to where this path is taking literature.

Obviously, verbal art, thanks to the ongoing changes, is capable of detecting and eroding all kinds of boundaries. It does not only highlight its own potential and expose it to reflection, but also expands its capabilities. Thus, fiction is trying to get back to the essentials that previously eluded verbalization, which may also explain why these essentials are still very relevant.

In the 20^th/early 21^st century, these concepts would be consistently supported by individual works of different years. Some of these texts were written by the Latvian-Russian prose writer, critic and journalist Andrei Levkin (b. 1954), winner of the Andrei Bely Prize (2001). This article focuses on his story, The Mediterranean War, written in the 1990s and published in 2002 in the book “Golem, Russian Version: Novel, Stories, Tale”.

The study explores a single, very small narrative work (close to poetic prose) by a modern author and sets it in the broad context of literary attempts to approach the sphere of the ineffable, which has been especially attractive to writers since the last third of the 19^th century.

A detailed analysis of the text allows us to consider a variety of correspondences and ties that unite The Mediterranean War with a number of works created by authors of different countries and historical periods — from Virginia Woolf to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Kurt Vonnegut. As we may witness the construction of artistic reality at the borders of linguistic capabilities, we may also compare the Russian flash fiction of the 21^st century with the previous traditions of world literature and thus come closer to comprehending the fundamental trends uniting different European cultures.