Discourse of Hunting in Pavel Krusanov’s Novel ‘Outdoor Games’ and the Literary Tradition: Reading Contemporary Russian Literature’

The new book by Pavel Krusanov, author of ‘The Angel’s Bite’, ‘American Hole’, ‘Dead Language’, and other equally unexpected and widely discussed works, this time revolves around hunting. The book is about hunting in its classic, Turgenev’s understanding. Hunting is in the new book, and it’s told so vividly, brightly, and with such expertise that you feel as if you yourself, like in a computer simulation, slip into the hero’s wading boots and squelch through the marshy bogs in anticipation of a successful shot.

The book is actually broader, deeper, and more astonishing than just about shooting a gun. And the geography of this book is not only Pskov region around Novorzhev. There is also the Peruvian selva with its mysteries and nighttime fears. There are many other roads that the author leads us down, immersing us in the complex, sometimes unpredictable world of a person’s inner self.

Contemporary Russian literature — the literature of the postmodern era — invites the reader to become a co-creator of the literary work. The discursive text of Pavel Krusanov’s novel ‘Outdoor Games’, which the author defines as a ‘novel-rosary’, combines diverse knowledge about hunting (including specialised aspects) and engages with the literary tradition of hunting prose. 

This literary tradition has two distinct poles, exemplified in the works of Sergei Aksakov and Ivan Turgenev: on one hand, we find the naturalist and ethnographic sketch, while on the other, there exists the literary tale which might not deal directly with hunting yet retains the image of the hunter-narrator.

To understand such a text, readers must be versed in both hunting discourse and the literary tradition to which Pavel Krusanov’s novel belongs. This lecture will explore how to approach the reading of such works, using this novel as a case study. 

Lecturer

Ekaterina Zorina graduated from the Faculty of Philology at St Petersburg University. After graduating in 2005, she joined the Department of Russian Language at SPbU, where she teaches courses and practical classes on the stylistics and syntax of modern Russian, morphemics and word formation, business Russian and business communication to undergraduate and graduate students.

Ekaterina Zorina supervises the practical training of the students of the Faculty of Philology, as well as the coursework and theses of the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students. Since 2022, she has been the head of the SPbU Linguistic Clinic and a member of the methodological committee of the SPbU School Olympiad.

Ekaterina Zorina’s academic and practical interests include syntax and stylistics of modern Russian, linguistic analysis of fiction, modern Russian literature, the works of Vladimir Nabokov, issues of Russian as a state language and applied rhetoric (communicative soft skills). 

The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

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