In “Russian Wanderer in the Post-Soviet Space: Homelessness in Ilichevsky’s
Matisse,” Jordan examines Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s conceptualization of homelessness
as a state of existential not belonging that beset the author and his peers when the
Soviet system collapsed in the early 1990s. The novel’s protagonist mitigates his
metaphorical homelessness by embracing actual homelessness, using it as a “part of a
flight to a deeper awareness” (Widmer); yet Jordan also shows that homelessness in
Matisse draws on the Russian spiritual tradition of strannichestvo, or departure from
the secular world in pursuit of a sacred destination. By bringing into the discussion the
writings of Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Ioann Lestvichnik, Jordan shows that although
strannichestvo in Matisse has lost its religious underpinnings, it remains primarily a
spiritual concept that allows an individual to break free from a mass society and gain
the kind of fulfillment that the Soviet state promised but failed to deliver.