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Abstract: This article explores the role of reiteration in Boris Pilnyak’s early prose and its role in the ornamental style of the writer, with particular attention to the short story A Thousand Years from the prosaic book Byl’yo (1919). The authors approach reiteration on different poetic levels – lexical, fabula, and narrative. Employing a combination of the close reading method with the variant of Bakhtinian literary studies developed at the Department of Theoretical and Historical Poetics at RSUH (V. I. Tyupa, N. D. Tamarchenko), the study disagrees with the vision of Pilnyak’s ornamentalism as primarily a stylistic phenomenon granting the text an ostentatious design. Reiterations manifest semantic shifts, modulate themes and motifs, discover the double-voicedness of the words of the story, and ultimately generate an epic world in which the narrative exists in the situation of the absence of a commonly shared point of view and coexistence of multiple stories that are derived from the common situation but reflect different life experience of the characters. This effect is particularly evident in the juxtaposition of perspectives within the story: Prince Vilyashev perceives the Revolution as reducing humanity to barbarism (“people as beasts”), while his brother Konstantin attributes savagery to the aristocracy itself (“we are beasts”). The semantic divergence embodied in these words remains unrecognized by the characters living in the conditions of qui pro quo seeming agreement. The main task of lexical reiterations is to express tension between the points of view of the characters, and to turn the attention of the reader to the meanings which are not directly expressed by the characters and belong to different “narrative stories” (V. I. Tyupa). Not only individual words and phrases but also various literary plots are reiterated in the short story. Plots and images of various books of the Bible, Lermontov, and ibn Fadlan's travelogue are brought into the orbit of the story. Reiteration of the plots is connected with the life experiences of the characters, which is comprehended through literary and cultural similes. Repetitions, lexical and fabula, highlight Pilnyak’s artistic world as an amalgam of countless transformations of the situational procedural series into narrative, event-driven stories explaining the actions of the characters in the world around them.

About the author(s) :

George S. Prokhorov

State University of Social Studies and Humanities (Kolomna, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4652-8698

Tatyana A. Kapyrina

State University of Social Studies and Humanities (Kolomna, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6139-2498

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 25.08.2025; date of publication: 29.12.2025

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