Representation of the World in the Novels of Arzhan Adarov
The fictional world in A.O. Adarov’s novels corresponds to several levels of narration. First, there is the “real” time of the novel’s events; second, historical reconstruction given through subjective focalization; third, the realm of the unreal conveyed by visions and dreams. The novel shows the modeled reality from the perspective of a particular person, a survivor of political repressions. Through the categories of life and death, love and fate, honor and dignity, the novel speaks of the eternal ontological values and the importance of self-identification in a very difficult time, a time of re-evaluation of old values and the search for moral guidelines. According to the author’s concept, traditional folk constants play a crucial role in the worldview and perception of the world and turn out to be crucial for individual choice. The sacralization of space and the presence of a symbolically charged topos in the center of the fictional world, itself an infinite mosaic of various local territories, supports the idea of the spatial structure of the novel as a single cosmic whole. Conventional chronotopic boundaries as well as the theme of death as a pass to the other world present in all the novels of this author, together with the motif of the “eternal return,” support his conception of the soul’s immortality.