The plot of the journey in Andrei Bitov’s story Birds, or The Catechesis of Man (1971, 1975). Article One. A lyrical hero’s inner dialogue as a way to overcome ontological disorientation
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Buhanova Ekaterina D. ,   Siberian State Medical University
Published: December 2024

This article is the first of two publications devoted to the poetics of Andrei Bitov’s travel story Birds, or The Catechesis of Man (1971, 1975) – the first part of the tetralogy novel The Catechumens (1970–2018). The aim of the article is to consider the line of internal dialogue conducted by the lyrical hero as a way he found to
overcome ontological disorientation. Semiotic, narratological, intertextual, and cultural methods were chosen as the main research methods. A review of the works of literary predecessors shows the need to expand the analysis of the story in question as a history of mental wandering. A general description of the story’s problems reveals the multicomponent nature of its semantic structure, which includes the plot of the journey, the natural-philosophical digressions of the narrator, and the plot of the mental split of the lyrical hero. The theoretical basis of the study is justified as corresponding to the latest sociocultural trends. The title of the story is interpreted as a metaphor for the spiritual path. In the analytical section of the article, the focus is on the line of “peripatetic” dialogues that the hero-narrator conducts with his friend Doctor D. The characters’ conversations are interpreted as a fact of real communication, as a split consciousness of the lyrical hero, and as a metaphor for the writer’s dialogical thinking. In Bitov’s story, three dialogues between the narrator and the doctor are consistently highlighted. The first of them, starting in the lecture hall and in the laboratory at the biostation and continuing in the Curonian dunes, reveals a focus on zoology, ecology and ethology as the spheres of D.’s scientific interests and gives an idea of man as a “biological creature”. The second and third conversations, localized on the Baltic coast, concentrate respectively on the mystery of the origin of the Universe and on the question of man’s place in the landscape of existence. The mask of a layman adopted by the “student” narrator is considered as a variant of “Socratic” “wise ignorance” (according to Mikhail Bakhtin). The evolution of the problematics of dialogues is revealed: ecological, ethological modes at the beginning of the story and ontological, epistemological at the end. It is concluded that the soteriological meaning of the dialogue lies in overcoming the ontological disorientation of man as a reconciliation of the worldviews of the scientist and the artist, the philosopher and the layman, the ethologist and the Christian, in the convergence of antinomian ideas about man as an “ecological sinner” and as a co-creator of the Cosmos itself. The dynamics of the image of consciousness of the lyrical hero are stated. By the end of the story he comes to the understanding that the natural scientific picture of the world only confirms the image of the Logos as a plan for the world,
primary in relation to it. It is argued that, by the end of the story, the hero’s thinking undergoes the transformation that is extremely achievable for him at this moment, and approaches the reconciliation of the antinomies of the empirical and intuitionistic, natural and civilizational, cosmogonic and eschatological.