Zhenya Berkovich’s Pitomtsy (2024): The Poetics of Quotations and Self-Quotations from a Prison Cell

• In Event: Reimagining the Past: Memory and Postmemory in Russia in the 2010-2020s

Abstract

Berkovich's novel was written in the prison cell where Berkovich, a theater director, poet and writer, is serving a six-year sentence on falsely fabricated charges of “justification for terrorism.” Intertwining poetry with prose, and tragedy with comedy, this 21st century saga of survival compares and contrasts the existence of anthropomorphic animals and birds with the human population of the female prison. The paper will focus on the post-modernist nature of the narrative and the numerous appeals to Russian and Soviet cultural memory via textual allusions, quotations and self-quotations. It will demonstrate how multiple intertextual dialogues with Berkovich's predecessors in the domain of both high culture and popular culture solidify Berkovich’s role as a powerful artist-martyr at the current stage of Russian cultural history.

Author

• Olga Simonova Partan, College of the Holy Cross