The article explores the system of self-reference expressions as an important structural element of A. Chciuk’s recollective dilogy «Atlantis» and «Lunar Land». The question of complex and multidimensional connections between literature, self-identity and place is considered. It is shown how and with what strategies the literature works with a complex experience of loss. Most of contemporary literary studies devoted to the mentioned dilogy focus mainly on the specifics of the narrated world, the issues of bałak, the characteristics of ethnocultural discourse or genre and style features. Instead, there is a lack of research on the self-reflexive dimension widely represented in the dilogy «Atlantis» and «Lunar Land». Research of this dimension as an important structural element of A. Chciuk’s texts will provide a better understanding of the peculiarities of the creation and functioning of a particular model of memoirs with the possibility of its further typology and contextualization, in particular in terms of a clearly signaled need to create new historical literary projects. One of the characteristic features common to both books by A. Chciuk can be considered a developed self-reference dimension, which covers various aspects of the creation and functioning of the recollective emigration narrative. The narrator of «Atlantis» and «Lunar Land» is interested not only in what and how to tell, but also in the very nature of writing. In narrator’s opinion, writing is always an anthropocentric act, a way of self-expression, work with individual experience, an attempt to discover self-constitution, the search for self-identity. The self-reference discourse of «Atlantis» and «Lunar Land» also reveals the relationships that are built between literature, self-identity and place. The narrativization of memory is a work with complex traumatic experience, complex frontier space, complex anthroposphere, burdened with destructive autostereotypes and heterostereotypes. The complex analysis of A. Chciuk’s recollective dilogy «Atlantis» and «Lunar Land» allows us to assert that self-reference is one of its important structural elements. It is important for the narrator to find out the compositional, thematic and genre features of writing about the past. In the center of narrator’s interest are such fundamental categories as memory, reminiscence and recollection. Writing, according to the subject of the narration, is always self-centered, (re)constructive, and meaningful. Writing about the past also means showing the complex interrelationships between self-identity, place, and experience. The self-reference dimension also focuses on the ways and strategies of writing about the phenomenology of the local community and cultural frontier’s functioning. The dilogy offers, therefore, a kind of methodology for modeling a recollective emigration self-narrative through overcoming the stereotype of multicultural idyll.
From Wunderkammern to Kinect - The Creation of Shadow Worlds