The autobiographical elements in Andrei Bely's Kotik Letaev

This bachelor's thesis examines deals with the way autobiographical or autofictional elements are represented in Kotik Letaev, a work written between 1915 and 1916 and first published between 1917 and 1918 in two issues of the collection Skify by the Russian writer Andrei Bely. The aim of the thesis is to show to what extent it is possible in this experimental text to distinguish between fact and fiction. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part begins with an overview of the biographical and literary-historical context of Bely's writing. The following chapter focuses on the composition of the work, and other quasi- autobiographical works by the author are also briefly discussed. This part concludes with an explanation of the generic and narrative specificities of the selected text. The second part of the thesis offers an analysis that focuses primarily on the depiction of characters, on space and on subjectively conceived time in which the story takes place, as well as on other autobiographical elements present in the work. In the conclusion, we attempt to interpret our findings through the prism of the theory of autofiction. The basis of our approach is the study by the scholar C. Criveller, who shows how A. Bely himself alternately labelled his prose in his own paratexts as fiction...