ABSTRACT
Sasha Sokolov’s second novel, Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom (Between dog and wolf), written in exile and published in 1980, is not easily accessible to the reader: it is a complex mosaic of various linguistic levels comprising regional elements and the base language of the peasants, neologisms, the language of the Bible as well as everyday Soviet speech and Russian colloquial. Sokolov is plainly not interested in depicting an empirically credible reality, a historical truth. For him the literary world is nothing but the product of the artist’s consciousness and does not cross its boundary. In all Sokolov’s books his characters express various theories about time which, although they are not identical, nonetheless all discuss the chimerical nature of a progressive, linear time that produces causality. Like the indications of time, the names of places also lose any referential validity through disintegration into their component parts, synonyms, and distinctly relativistic, purely euphonic use.
