scholarly journals The world-modeling function of Russian-foreign bilingualism in the prose of S. Aflatuni (“Clay letters, floating apples”)

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 300-306
Author(s):  
Alfia I. Smirnova ◽  

The prose of the Central Asian writer Suhbat Aflatuni is analyzed in the article in the context of the concept of transculturation, which is based on the principle of interference in the interaction of different national cultures, when “cultural diversity and universality” become the “heritage” of one person (M. Epstein). To determine the specifics of the image of the world in the novel “Clay Letters, Floating Apples” (2005), the article aims to reveal the mechanism of interaction between different languages and cultural codes and to trace the world-modeling function of Russian-foreign bilingualism. The text of the novel-parable is complexly organized, it intertwines the events of the present and the past, united by the themes of the Teacher and students, the awakening of genetic memory and the acquisition of the lost ancient alphabet, the return to national spiritual origins as the life-giving moisture of life (the motive of the connection of “clay letters” and water as the source of life in the symbolism of the image of “floating apples”). Thanks to the fairy tale form of the narration and the stylized language based on Russian-foreign bilingualism, the effect of interference carried out “at the borders”, in the zone of inter-lingualism, the author manages to create a universal, syncretic image of the world that demonstrates the attachment of the writer's personality to many cultures. The artistic style of the novel resembles a bright ornament of an oriental carpet with cultural codes encrypted in the drawing – as a continuation of ancient national traditions. At the same time, the form of the parable, the mythologized space, images and motives, the special author's optics, which is based on Russian-foreign bilingualism, allow us to talk about the connection between the novel and the traditions of magical realism.

Author(s):  
Tetiana Bovsunivska

The paper deals with the poetics of the novel, based on the principles of literary cyberpunk. William Gibson, the founder of cyberpunk as a genre, in the novel “Pattern Recognition” used the looking-glass image of Lewis Carroll’s book “Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There” as a leitmotif, reminiscently curved and shown only in the mind of the main character Case Pollard. The paper analyzes the semantics of the leitmotif of looking-glass and its functionality in the novel, as well as the conformity with the principles of transrealism and posthumanism. The state of the main character is not explained by some acts or periods of the day, but by hormonal disorder; the scientific awareness is intertwined with the metaphoric field. Thus William Gibson’s artistic style acquires obvious features of cyberpunk. If Alice was just a weird kid who invented the world of fairy-tale creatures, Gibson’s character Case lives in a transreal world, full of various man-made modifications of space and humans. The modern Case-Alice does not invent anything, because the fairy-tale situation of her life is already embedded in the nature of civilizational development. Case as a heroine of the novel fully complies with the requirements of transrealism: she is not ‘normal’, she has a diagnosis and medical history. Тhe ‘F: F: F’ program (fragments) is created by an autistic Russian girl. The neurotic characters that Case meets are atypical, all in their own way. That is why the world around modern Alice, who is Case at the same time, is distorted by the abnormality, which is not hidden by the heroes. The cyberspace of modern human existence transforms all the sores of society into customary artificial symbols of degradation – posthumanistic codes.


Author(s):  
Varvara A. Byachkova ◽  

The article raises the topic of space organization in writings by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The object of analysis is the novel A Little Princess. The novel, addressed primarily to children and teenagers, has many similarities with David Copperfield and the works of Charles Dickens in general. The writer largely follows the literary tradition created by Dickens. The space of the main character is divided into three levels: the Big world (states and borders), the Small world (home, school, city) and the World of imagination. The first two worlds give the reader a realistic picture of Edwardian England, the colonial Empire, through the eyes of a child reveal the themes of unprotected childhood, which the writer develops following the literary tradition of the 19th century. The Big and Small worlds also perform an educational function, being a source of experience and impressions for the main character. In the novel, the aesthetic of realism is combined with folklore and fairy-tale elements: the heroine does not completely transform the surrounding space, but she manages to change it partially and also to preserve her own personality and dignity while experiencing the Dickensian drama of child disenfranchisement, despair and loneliness. The World of imagination allows the reader to understand in full the character of Sarah Crewe, demonstrates the dynamics of her growing up, while for herself it is a powerful protective mechanism that enables her to pass all the tests of life and again become a happy child who can continue to grow up and develop.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 98-108
Author(s):  
Linh Phan Trong Hoang

Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s poetics, the article approaches Le Minh Phong’s novel The Path from two characteristics including discourse and symbolization. The writer created the coexistence and dialogue between two symbols of awareness and body and used it to present the understanding of people’s lives in modern society. Surrounded by irrational taboos, people fell into the status of losing their voice power. Regaining that lost power, as for the character by Le Minh Phong, is a hopeless path. Hence, the world in the novel exhibited gloom, tearfulness, blood and death, along with the sound of screams, profanity and curses. With the achieved study results, the article contributes to assert Le Minh Phong’s position as a typical artistic style of contemporary Vietnamese literature.


Author(s):  
H. M. Yurchak

The article is devoted to the examination of the existential image of the world created by the writer in the novel, highlighting the peculiarities of the national consciousness. It has been proven that the writer managed to find a balance between the dynamic and intriguing plot regarding the awakening of the national consciousness, and the establishment of the nationhood- thus creating a distinctive type of the adventure novel- a spy novel.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
Eleonora F. Shafranskaya ◽  
Tatyana V. Volokhova

The literary work of the Russian writer Leonid Solovyov (1906-1962) was widely known in the Soviet period of the twentieth century - but only by means of the novel dilogy about Khoja Nasreddin. His other stories and essays were not included in the readers repertoire or the research focus. One of the reasons for this is that the writer was repressed by Stalinist regime due to his allegedly anti-Soviet activities. In the light of modern post-Orientalist studies, Solovyovs prose is relevant as a subcomponent of Russian Orientalism both in general sense and as its Soviet version. The Oriental stories series, which is the subject of this article, has never been the object of scientific research before. The authors of the article are engaged, in a broad sense, in identifying the features of Solovyovs Oriental poetics, and, narrowly, in revealing some patterns of the Central Asian picture of the world. In particular, the portraits of social and professional types, met by Solovyov there in 1920-1930, are presented. Some of them have sunk into oblivion, others can be found today, in the XXI century. Comparative, typological and cultural methods are used in the interdisciplinary context of the article.


Author(s):  
Anna V. Kuznetsova

The article discusses the pragmatic specificity of the cultural codes’ representatives in the literary text containing foreign language inclusions. Pragmatic approach in history and criticism of literature allows to identify the features of the decoding copyright process, their impact on the reader, as well as describe various language products and methods for coding literary communication as a whole. Ethnic identification, equated, including in person axiology, dictates the search for deep patterns in texts containing foreign language inclusions. The complex nature of such literary text is determined primarily by the fact that such text manifests assimilation aspects of the literary personality of cultural codes of other national affiliation. The consequence of the use of such lexical components is the actualization of markers of lingvoculture and deepening the pragmatic potential of the literary text. The relevance of the article is determined by the need to establish the status of cultural codes in the organization of the semantic space of literary text, in the transmission of cultural meanings, meaningful both in the individually-copyright picture of the world and in the functioning of the collective consciousness of the nation. The purpose of the article is to determine the pragmatic specificity of cultural codes in the literary text, influencing the receptive-interpretative activity of the reader, on the example of the implementation of foreign language inclusions as markers of cultural codes in the essay “Caucasian” (1841) and the fairy tale “Ashik-Kerib” (1837) by M.Yu. Lermontov. As a carrier of the world national painting, the author of the literary text, in the event of a certain literary plan, is able to use the means of two languages, and the individual-author’s picture of the world of such a literary personality is characterized by the dynamism determined by the representation of linguistic components, which also include foreign language inclusions (orequivalent vocabulary (realities, exotic, ethnographs)). The literary text, which presents other-speaking inclusions, specially reflects the historical, socio-political, cultural and ethical being of the ethnos, which ultimately determines the author’s desire to expand the aesthetic opportunities of cultural codes marked in a special way in such a text.


Author(s):  
Nadezhda I. Pavlova

The article is to study a mythological subtext of the novel “Children of mine” by G. Yakhina, which appeared at different levels: composition, plot, construction of the system of characters ' images. Main character of the novel, Jacob Bach, and his beloved Clara are reunited into a single whole, not only as lovers, but also as representatives of two interrelated and complementary principles of German culture-folklore and literature. The interaction of this pair of heroes should be considered in this symbolic context. Thus, the novel develops a fundamentally significant for its conception motif of prophecy, which implies a subtext about the creation of the world-Logos, which is further developed in the narrative, when the image of the main character fulfills the function of guardian of the cultural memory of the Volga Germans. At the same time, the act of creativity is synonymous with creation, which allows us to grasp in a complex novel whole the repeatability of components of a closed cycle of “myth-life”, fully realized in its narrative structure. Mythological world surrounding Bach is in opposition to the space of Soviet history, embodied in the image of the agitator Hoffmann. There is an inverted picture of the world: historical world as dead and the world of culture as a living world. Thus, in the novel, the poles of life and death exchange places in relation to the present and the past. In view of this conception, one can read a deep intention of the writer representing the word of culture as giving immortality and life in eternity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 266-299
Author(s):  
Alexander A. Panchenko

In the second chapter of The Gift, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev recalls a “Kirghiz fairy tale” about a human eye that wants “to encompass everything in the world.” The plot of the story goes back to a Talmudic parable about Alexander the Great. The parable was retold in Russian by a number of writers and scholars in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. However, it seems unlikely that Nabokov did use in any original piece of Inner Asian folklore in his novel. More probable is that he invented the “fairy tale” proceeding from one of the Russian versions of the parable. At the same time, Nabokov’s version is based on a number of international literary and folkloric motifs and is related to the “Kalmyk fairy tale” in Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter and to 19 th century Russian literary fairy tales in verse. While the central theme of Nabokov’s parable is the insatiability of human vision and the frailty of life, its con- and subtexts allude to some other recurrent themes of the novel — death and immortality, the quest for paradise, closed doors and exile, sources of love and poetical inspiration. The Oriental coloring of the tale (and the second chapter of the novel in general) appears to be a literary play with a limited number of texts, in particular with The Captain’s Daughter and A Journey to Arzrum. This allows discussing the “Kirghiz fairy tale” as an intratextually meaningful part of the novel rather than a marginal encrustation. It seems that Nabokov’s literary work with “migratory” plots and folklore texts was in a way close to the methods and ideas developed in Alexander Veselovsky’s school of comparative literary studies.


Author(s):  
D.Yu. Syryseva

The subject of analysis in the article is a different, magical reality in the novel by the modern Tatar Russian-speaking writer A. Nuri “Passenger of his destiny”, the ways of its creation and functioning at different levels of the artistic organization of the text. The complexity of external and internal boundaries is shown both in the space of the physical objective world, depicted in the novel, and in the consciousness of the protagonist, who is trying to understand the world and the nature of magical reality. If the world of physical reality is meaningful and logically cognizable, then dreams, hallucinations, secret signs become the methods of cognizing another reality. The author examines the influence of the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel Angel Asturias, Salman Rushdie both at the level of macropoetics (the space-belt component of the novel) and at the level of micropoetics (images, episodes, motifs) on the artistic world of the novel. The article shows connections with oriental narrative discourse and fairy-tale imagery. Conclusions are drawn about the connection between the aesthetics of the novel and the aesthetics of magical realism.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 193-207
Author(s):  
Marina Guister ◽  

The nineteenth–twentieth centuries’ frontier, and onto the nineteen-thirties, is the period when the literature and the folklore of the Celtic and Scandinavian counties were brought into Russia. In this way Nikolaj Goumilev, the author of the drama “Gondla”, translates “Countess Kathleen” by W. B. Yeats and writes his own drama “Morny’s beauty” influenced by some recurring themes of the Irish sagas. The drama-poem “Gondla” is also based on the Irish comparanda, namely on the history and the sagas of the echtrae-cycle of tales. The story takes place in Iceland in the eleventh century; Gondla, the Christian, the son of the Irish king, converts the Icelanders into Christianity. Goumilev himself mentions the sagas about “the hump-backed prince Condla” abducted by a fairy as the source of his drama. The saga of Connla the Fair, or Echtrae Chonnlai, is known to him from the work by H. d’Arboi de Jubainville Cours de Littérature Celtique, as well as, possibly, from the private conversations with A. Smirnov, the first Russian translator of the Irish sagas. The story of Connla contains some widespread folk motifs (cf. S. Thompson’s Motif-index), such as F 302 Fairy mistress, or rather F 302.3.1 Fairy entices man into fairyland. The motifs in question are closely related to those of the Swan-maiden (F 302.4.1 – Fairy comes into man’s power when he stills her wings, and D 361.1 – A swan transforms herself at will into a maiden). The swan-plots are of great importance for Goumilev’s “Gondla”, since the main characters of the drama, Gondla and Lera his fiancée (both Irish) are compared there to the swans persecuted by the wolves (the pagan Icelanders). The motifs are particularly prominent in the case of the Irish folktales and legends. The swan-plots from the Celtic and Slavonic folktales and legends are closely related in “Gondla” to the fairy-tales by Andersen, such as The Marsh King’s Daughter, The Ugly Duckling, The Swan’s Nest and The Wild Swans. The plot of the last fairytale is close to that of the Irish legend about the king Lir’s children transformed into swans (Oidheadh Chloinne Lir). In the same time, this plot is close to the fairy-tale type AT 451 – The maiden who seeks for her brothers and AT 451* – Sister as mysterious housekeeper. The story of this type, with the brothers transformed into swans and a swan maiden as the mother of the swan-children, is literary fixed in the twelfth century in the novel Dolopathos sive de Rege et Septem Sapientibus. The main character of Goumilev’s drama is the poet, the ruler and the priest who baptises Iceland at the same time. As such, he illustrates one of Goumilev’s favourite ideas: the poets must govern the world, as the druids used to do in the distant past.


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