The Semantic Role of Intertext in Mikhail Elizarov’s We Went Out For A Smoke For 17 Years…

The article examines a confessional autobiographical short story by Mikhail Elizarov, We Went Out For A Smoke For 17 Years…, that takes place in the early 1990s. The protagonist, a young university student who successfully proved himself in the poetic field, suddenly changes his usual bookworm scholar lifestyle to the lifestyle of a bodybuilding fanatic socializing with “gang lads”. The analysis found that an important semantic role in the short story is played by accented intertextual parallels that correlate the life path of Elizarov’s character with the - largely similar - search of the autopsychological characters by Yukio Mishima and Eduard Limonov. It seems that one of the important keys to understanding the paradoxical path of Elizarov’s character is Yukio Mishima’s autobiographical essay Sun and Steel which is directly devoted to bodybuilding. Elizarov’s short story should be interpreted as the story of an autopsychological character transforming into a true writer. The path of the short story protagonist being an aspiring writer acquires relative clarity only in the context of intertextual links to the autobiographical texts of the two renowned writers of the twentieth century.