TIME AND SPACE IN SKITALETS’S THE HOUSE OF CHERNOVS
This is a rst-ever study of the spatial and temporal organization of the novel The House of Chernovsby Skitalets (pseudonym of S.G. Petrov, 1869-1941), in image/svg+xml which the fate of the artist Valerian Semov and the history of the Chernov family of merchants are recreated against the background of the Russian panorama of the early 20th century. Skitalets worked on the novel in China’s Harbin (1922-1934), where he lived after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The spatial-temporal continuum of the novel is unusually large. The central storyline unfolds over two decades (from the 1890s to the celebration of the rst anniversary of the revolution) and includes many travels of the characters, which predetermines the propensity for epic construction and the evolution of the value system of the protagonist. The House of Chernovsis a family novel which, speci cally, describes the life of a young Russian artist, Valerian Semov. It is also a historical novel which shows in detail the signs of the time, the interaction of social classes in the rst two decades of the 20th century. Artistic time is also broadcast through the confrontation of art movements: realism, modernism and avant-garde. The First World War marks a new beginning for personal time: the hero gets the chance to resolve his love con ict. The space re ects Skitalets’s thoughts about historical shifts in Russia (descriptions of the urban environment and the manor house in central Russia are signi cant). And all this proves necessary to reveal the speci cs of Valerian Semov’s formation as an artist and as a person.