Проза Г. Яхиной как опыт художественной реконструкции исторического прошлого и создания персональной мифологии

Abstract

Guzel Yakhina’s prose is explored in the discourse of “new historicism”, the essence of which is not limited by presenting historical events, but expresses interest in the fate of people in the flow of historical time. The focus of the writer’s attention in the novels “Zuleikha opens her eyes” (2016) and “Echelon to Samarkand” (2021) is the Soviet past, tragic episodes of Russian history of the late 1910s–1940s: the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War, devastation and total famine of the early 1920s, dispossession and repression of the 1930s. The purpose of the analysis: to consider the interpretation of the historical past, to reveal the Soviet chronotope in the novels of the writer, to reveal the artistic concept based on the author’s personal mythology. In the analyzed texts, the themes of the “great famine”, dispossession and repression revealed as a collective trauma. The author contrasts death and destruction with the humanistic idea of faith in man and the assertion of traditional values: fraternal unity and mutual assistance, caring for children, the victory of good over evil. The historical material to which Yakhina refers, allows her to correlate the low and the high in man, the false and the true, the topical and the timeless, to contrast her personal mythology with the consequences of a historical catastrophe and non-existence. The study of literary texts in the discourse of “new historicism”, according to A. Etkind, requires solving the problem, which “consists in distinguishing the literal and metaphorical meanings of the text, paying tribute to both and combining them in a new historicizing reading”. The experience of such a “historicizing reading” determined the concept of this article.