TY  - JOUR
A1  - Strätling, Susanne
T1  - The Author as Researcher
BT  - Boris Pil’niak Samples the Arctic Sea
JF  - Russian Literature
N2  - This article proposes a new perspective on avant-garde travel writing through the lens of scientific field work, investigating these new writing techniques in Boris Pil’niak’s expedition prose. In the 1920s, the researching writer represents a hidden, but influential counterpart to the widely propagated figure of the working writer. While the author as producer combines word and deed in an operative act, the author as researcher investigates the production of knowledge. This entails revising the centrality of facts. Literature as artistic research subverts factography by going beyond the horizons of veristic data registration to include uncharted realms and vague possibilities. This exploration leads to specific genres: the author as researcher tries his hand at a kind of laboratory text, a prolific genre at the intersection of testing equipment, recording media, and hypothetical thought. Not confined to a sterile lab, avant-garde writer-researchers, as members of research expeditions, oscillate between their home writing desks and the remote depths of the emerging USSR. At the same time, they explore writing practices situated between data acquisition, sampling, fact-finding, observation and recording.
KW  - Arctic
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2019.04.012
SN  - 0304-3479
SN  - 1878-3678
VL  - 103
SP  - 283
EP  - 303
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -