Release:
2018, Vol. 4. №1About the authors:
Olga K. Lagunova, Dr. Sci. (Philol), Professor, Russian and Foreign Literature Department, University of Tyumen; eleshenka@yandex.ruAbstract:
This article aims to present the experience of three major Russian-speaking writers of the last third of the 20th century in the aspect of building an artistic entity of ontological type. These authors are the most significant in the three national literatures of North Asia: Kyrgyz, Nenets, and Khanti. A typological approach to texts captures global processes in the consciousness of the pagan peoples and ways of modeling the world and the man in terms of segmentation of the Soviet Union. The article analyzes the novels by Ch. T Aitmatov (“The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years” and “The Scaffold”), E. D. Aipin (“Khanty or the Star of the Morning Dawn” and “The Mother of God in the Bloody Snow”), and A. P. Nerkagi (“The Silent One”) in order to reveal the genre mechanisms of text composition.
The authors propose the subject of study that contains several system provisions. Therefore, the setting for the existential expression identifies the narrative strategy. This explains the authors’ choice of the cultural hero, endowed with a special mission in this world; such a hero combines being chosen, consecration, and sacrifice. This model can be implemented in an embodiment of one figure (Aipin and Nerkagi) or two figures (Aitmatov). It also involves projecting on the natural world, in which animals are portrayed as the chosen ones. Being endowed with a mission prevents the hero deviating from it in the horizontal movement. Therefore, the biggest significance in the text belongs to the signs and expressions of vertical connections (inserted elements like the legend of a man who has gone up, or the images of birds, wood, fire, arrows, and behavioral signs: prayers and animals’ anxiety).
As the rate of the visible time extension, the authors choose thoughts and the representation of the events as links in the ancestral chain that are important for the whole family (seen as a people’s invariant). It removes the clarity of distinction of the past, present, and future, creating an almost physical filling horizontal image of the ancestral memory, as if it is an everyday reality.
As the writers perceive the world as sacral, they do not mind the aesthetic problems as a separate — everything holy is beautiful. The result is dominant (in the simulation of the elements of the stylistic harmony) ethical imperatives, based on the traditional folk culture and, therefore, the myth and folklore codes. That, in turn, implyies a path through the chaos to the cosmos, to the order; subordination to the calendar life cycle, and the formality of presentation and evaluation.
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