The Infinite Deadlock instance of literary work
Major works
The Infinite Deadlock
(Alternative translations: Endless Dead-end, Endless Impasse).
Galkovsky's first major work was the philosophical novel Бесконечный тупик (The Infinite Deadlock). The work consists of three parts. The first part, completed in 1984 and entitled "The Round World," is a brief analysis of, and homage to, the work of the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Rozanov's writings were not published during Soviet rule, and he had become somewhat obscure by the time Galkovsky was writing. "The Round World" argues that Rozanov's work is "very modern and relevant" to Russia in the late 20th century, and that he is "perhaps… the most modern Russian philosopher."
The second part of The Infinite Deadlock, referred to as "The Infinite Deadlock (main text)" in the third edition, is an essay (completed in 1985) that fleshes out many of the arguments made in "The Round World." In this work, Rozanov is placed in the greater context of 19th century Russian history and philosophy. The essay favorably compares Rozanov to such writers as Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev, whom Galkovsky views as "infantile" and "talkative." Galkovsky makes the argument that the Russian language is inherently highly amorphous, and that Russian culture is better adapted to faith (which is associated with "silence") than to reason ("logos" or "speech"). In this interpretation, the fragmented nature of Rozanov's later writing is the ideal expression of the Russian way of thinking.
The third part of The Infinite Deadlock is called "Comments on 'The Infinite Deadlock'" and consists of 949 "comments" (fragments of text anywhere from one sentence to several pages long).  Each "comment" is addressed to a single phrase, either from the "main text" in the second part, or from an earlier comment. Thus, the comments have a tree structure, with one main branch commenting on the "main text," and other smaller branches taking off from comments in the main branch, forming a hypertext. The comments constitute the vast majority of the overall text of The Infinite Deadlock (the third part takes up 1077 out of 1230 pages in the third edition).
The fragmented, episodic nature of the comments resembles Rozanov's style of writing. However, although Rozanov provided the main inspiration for Galkovsky's work, he is only one of many subjects discussed in the third part of The Infinite Deadlock. The main topics covered by the hypertext include the following:
type of example of manifestation of representation of