Bundle of intense warmth and light. On Mikhail Shishkin’s Prose

This is the second monograph to be published on Mikhail Shishkin’s works, after the one published by Sergei Orobiy in 2011. In this study the author delves into thirty years’ worth of Shishkin's prose (novels, stories, essays) and examines them from diverse perspectives, poetical, existential and culturological. Proceeding on the basis that aesthetical and universal values, as well as interpersonal relations, are essential aspects of the writer’s work, the author makes reference to archetypes and topoi of world culture in order to investigate how Shishkin describes modernity and contemporary human condition. His work is analysed for the first time through the prism of both classical (Heraclitus, Marcus Aurelius) and contemporary (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida) concepts and theories.

Comprising three chapters, the book traces many of Shishkin’s previously unresearched but recurring principle themes: collecting, death, loss, mourning, family. The author focuses on three aspects of Shishkin’s prose: on the motif of warmth and light; on the writer’s activity as collector; on universal archetypes and avatars (Tristan and Isolde, writer, reader, child).