Smile – a deceptive image of “internal man” (on the novel the Collector of paradise by E. Chizhov)

Abstract

The article examines psychopoetics – a term derived by Efim Etkind (2005) which stands for “internal experiences” and “external speech” – which is observed as a relationship between the “internal man” and “external man”. Smile, as Marina Lvovna’s facial expression in Chizhov’s novel The Collector of Paradise (2019) is an “external” realisation of her “internal womanhood”. Marina Lvovna has a progressive Alzheimer disease, and her smile, as an ambiguous sign (Vinogradov 1999), is a very important emblem of her past and her internal life (she is forgetting things, she is looking for her childhood home, she keeps forgetting that she has a son, etc.). Her son collects things from the past, and she wants to return to her past. She is smiling during the whole novel, but her smile is changeable: joyful, glad, shy, lost. It is a shell (mask) of her internal life.