Inner Journeys and Urban Itineraries in the Autobiographical Novel Daytime Stars
by Olga Berggolts · The article deals with two central episodes of the novel: the journeys of the main character between early October 1941 and February 1942 from the center of Leningrad to the suburb of Nevskaya Zastava. According to Lotman’s essays on semiotics of the city, these movements are characterized not only by the crossing of a spatial border but also by the perception of a temporal dimension, which places the city in the present time, in the protagonist’s personal biographical time and in the ideological time of the collective of which she feels part. The center of Leningrad is an ‘own’ space where she moved to a ‘House-Commune’ in 1930, while the peripheral space is subject to different interpretations.
In 1941 it is perceived as a nostalgic return to the past, to her childhood home. But,
it also appears, on the one hand, as an ‘alien’ place, symbolic of a despised petty bourgeois world, and, on the other, as an ideologically significant space. The faded revolutionary slogans on the facades of the factories bring back to the protagonist’s mind the image of herself as a young and energetic komsomolka. In the journey of February 1942, the intimate time of the protagonist and the time of the city are anchored to the contingent situation.
Both in the town center and in the suburbs, everything is still, frozen, and dead. However, the dialogue with her father pours new vitality into the protagonist: the periphery again becomes a proper place, a bearer of a hope of both individual and collective change.
