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[Alexandr Korol]

Volume 2

A first-person novel
Brief analysis

So interesting — right now, in front of me, is the printed edition of the second volume of “Alternative History”: on the cover, I have a square; a linen cover; a two-column layout, biblical in style; none of the chapters are titled, but the sixteenth chapter has a title, written as “New Heaven and New Earth”; the pages are also thin, like in a Bible. Why am I starting with this now? Once again, I want to remind you that one of the authorial techniques and one of the ways of presenting information that I use in my novel “Alternative History” is not just the technique of writing the novel in the first person, but the very immersion itself — like a matrix within a matrix, like a dream within a dream, like in the movie “Inception” with Leonardo DiCaprio — where the reader plunges into my novel, encountering and immersing themselves in the story of the main character, who is not just telling about himself and what happens to him but is telling about how he is writing this book. That is the paradox. So, it turns out that there is one world where there is an author, Alexandr Korol, who is a person, just a writer, writing a book, the novel “Alternative History”. But when we read the novel “Alternative History”, we are reading a story about how the main character, Alexandr Korol, is writing a book called “Alternative History”, and this is a first-person novel — this kind of immersion. This is not the only technique used. Another interesting technique here is something similar to the emblem of the Audi company, where one ring overlaps another, a ring overlaps a ring — these rings. If you look at these circles in a plane, they overlap each other, and when they do, they form a certain kind of mandorla. This method, this principle, is present in everything in our world. It even exists in how a person is structured, how they develop. One of the latest things I recently recalled and am working on now is that a person themselves has cycles. As an example, we can take the stages of a girl’s life: there is a girl as an infant, a girl as a child, a girl as a teenager, then a young woman, a woman, then an elderly woman, and consequently, a grandmother. Though this can be viewed differently — perhaps an elderly woman is already a grandmother; this question remains open. But these are stages of formation, this is time, this is what I am reflecting