The concept of life in the late work of F.A. Iskander

The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of “life” as understood by F.A. Iskander and to explain the genre specificity of his later works through a content analysis of metaphorical structures in the collections of essays, notes, and short stories by the writer. If his earlier works are mostly collections of short stories and novel-in-short stories, then later in his career he turns to such genres as collections of essays and notes. The focus of this study will be on the collections “A little about a lot” and “From notebooks”, the essays “Stalin and Vuchetich”, “State and conscience”, “Poets and kings”, “Mozart and Salieri”, and “Reflections of a writer”, as well as the short story “The plot of existence”. Life is not contrasted with death, and Iskander does not insist on the triumph of the positive over the negative in his work. Through this research, the author will draw the following conclusions. In his later work, Iskander departs from the conceptual metaphor of “life as wholeness”. He argues that only the depiction of life through art or theory can be considered complete, while life itself is inherently fragmented. He believes that only ideas founded on humanistic principles can bring some harmony to the chaotic nature of life. The main feature of Iskander’s later writings is fragmentation, which is based on associative thinking.