‘In Transit’: Taxi Driving as a Mini Paradigm in Gaito Gazdanov’s Night Roads and Helen Potrebenko’s Taxi!

Authors

  • Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton Gulf University for Science & Technology (GUST)

Abstract

"this essay will explore the experience of taxi driving in modernist Russian-French writer Gaito Gazdanov’s Night Roads and postmodern Ukrainian-Canadian writer Helen Potrebenko’s Taxi!. Both texts are exilic in nature (and as such, prime objects of comparative study), and both explore the geographic and social boundaries of the city in order to reveal the metaphysical and psychological boundaries of exilic/migrant identity. Across time, these two novels engage in a fascinating intertextual dialogue. Night Roads was written after Gazdanov left revolutionary Russia; Taxi! was published after Potrebenko migrated from her native Alberta to Vancouver. Both novels use taxi driving as a metaphor to reflect upon the human condition in the urban setting. Yet their fundamentally different aesthetics of the subject link the experience of taxi driving to various levels of the subject’s freedom, as well as to contrasting images of the city."

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Published

2014-09-15

Issue

Section

Articles