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Abstract: This article examines metanarrative structures in the prose of Yuz Aleshkovsky’s émigré period (novellas “Flea Tango” (1986) and “Ruru” (1989)). The aim of this study is to describe the functioning of metanarrative in these works as an “intermediate” narrative level that simultaneously belongs to the narrated story and exposes the mechanism of its construction. The theoretical framework is based on the distinction between metanarration and metafictionality proposed by B. Neumann and A. Nünning. Мetanarration is understood as self-reflexive narrative utterances about the act of storytelling itself, which do not disrupt the work’s aesthetic illusion or expose its conventionality. The analysis demonstrates that both novellas realize metanarrative ambivalence through opposing structural strategies. “Flea Tango” employs a framed «manuscript-within-manuscript» construction featuring an unreliable editor, while “Ruru” explicitly presents a recording narrator whose literary function is revealed not through self-reflection but through remarks of the characters. It is shown that gestures of narrative control (abbreviations, interruptions, paralipsis) and gestures of its loss (involuntary speech, the impossibility of fixing the living word) do not oppose but mutually complement one another. The very attempt to control the narrative renders visible what resists control, and conversely, the fixation of lost control is only possible in the presence of a controlling instance. The central metaphors of the novellas (olfaction in “Flea Tango” and rhyme in “Ruru”) function as figurative equivalents of textual redundancy – the meaning that arises beyond authorial intention. The study concludes that in these texts, the liminality of the subject does not generate a narrative form but is revealed through it. Metanarrative reflection on the conditions of text generation makes the threshold position of the characters a structural, rather than merely plot-based, property of the work. This reveals a distinctive variant of Aleshkovsky’s poetics, in which the “intermediate” status of the subject and the “intermediate” position of metanarration between diegesis and exegesis are structurally correlated.

About the author(s) :

Mikhail Yu. Egorov

Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University

named after K. D. Ushinsky (Yaroslavl, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0049-1535

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 12.05.2026; date of publication: 31.10.2026

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