The categories of life and death in the unbinary model of the world : selected stories by Jelena Dolgopiat

The analysis of selected works by Jelena Dolgopiat leads to the conclusion that the world presented in her short stories cannot be characterized by binary oppositions. In the chaotic contemporary world they lose their sense, because unambiguous separation of fi ction from reality is impossible, or maybe the opposition of death and physical life is impossible. Memory grows into the rank of highest value deciding about the life and the loss of it equals death. This presentation of the life and death problem seems to depict in continuation of the idea of Nikolay Fiodorov, that had been taken up before by the Russian writers such as e.g. Andrey Platonov or Vladimir Nabokov. Perceiving and presenting the world as heterogeneous rhizome allows however to discern in Jelena Dolgopiat’s output the postmodernist understanding of existence.