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Russian Wanderer in the Post-Soviet Space
Homelessness in Ilichevsky’s Matisse
in Canadian-American Slavic StudiesIn “Russian Wanderer in the Post-Soviet Space: Homelessness in Ilichevsky’s Matisse,” Katya Jordan examines Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s conceptualization of homelessness as a state of existential not belonging that beset the author himself and others of his generation when the Soviet system collapsed in the early 1990s. The novel’s protagonist attempts to mitigate his metaphorical homelessness by choosing to embrace actual homelessness and to use it as “part of a flight to a deeper awareness” (Widmer); yet Jordan also shows that the type of homelessness that Ilichevsky depicts draws on the Russian spiritual tradition of strannichestvo, the kind of wandering that allows one to leave the secular world behind in pursuit of a spiritual destination, never to return to either the physical or the spiritual point of origin. By bringing into the discussion the writings of Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Ioann Lestvichnik, Jordan shows that although homelessness in Matisse has lost its religious underpinnings, it nevertheless remains primarily a spiritual concept that allows an individual to break free from the mass society one is living in.
