The journey of Claire in the works of Gaito Gazdanov: the analysis of the female image of Claire in the novels “An Evening with Claire”, “Hannah”, and “The Fate of Salome”

  This article is dedicated to the analysis of the female image of Claire and its variant in the works of Gaito Gazdanov. This character type in the works of G. Gazdanov often resembles the past in the present, i.e. an important part of the “lost world” for the protagonist. However, deliberate examination allows following the gradual transformation of the authors attitude towards the character of Claire throughout his creative path. In the novel “Ab Evening with Clair”, the author adheres to priority of that past world over the present, while in the novel of his later period “The Fate of Salome”, the narrator tends to release from the shadow of the past. The underlying cause for such change lies in the transition of the writer from the romantic theurgical worldview towards phenomenal. In the later period, Gazdanov reconsidered the real world and justified the earthly existence due to the fact that submerging into the own inner world can entail loneliness and dissolution “Self” in one’s mind. The goal of this research consists in tracing the transformation of the role of Claire in the works of Gaito Gazdanov, as well as in description of different types of relations between the protatonist and the heroine in order to prove the evolution of the writer's reasoning on the problem of “two-worldness”. The relevance of this article consists in explication of the type of Claire in Gazdanov’s artistic system of “two-worldness” as a literary technique, as well as from the new perspective of studying the evolution the writer’s worldview.