„TEK U PARIZU ZAPLAKALI SU PRVI PUT”: SLIKA PARIZA U ROMANU O LONDONU MILOŠA CRNjANSKOG

Abstract

The paper examines the image of Paris in Miloš Crnjanski’s A Novel of London: at first as a space of memory of the main character, and then as a figure of urban semiology. Paris is reflected in the situations, faces and conditions that determine the Russian emigrant in London, so we see it as a city in a relationship of doubling. As a double to London, Paris represents an urban ambience that participates in building the story of Ryepnin and Nadya. It is not a current existential space, but a city of memories of events, performances and accidents that will be repeated and magnified in London. Paris is an important mnemotope in Crnjanski’s book, which articulates the relationship between memory and oblivion as a framework for the dramatic manifestation of the existence of the modern subject and the poetics of modernist narration. Although it is not the only place of such orientation, Paris is marked as that figure of the urban through which Ryepnin passes into the game of signs and thus irrevocably eludes others, London, Russia, himself. Paris and the French legion of foreigners are signs whose effects enable the hero to hide his disappearance from others when he leaves London.