"ANOTHER WORLD": PROSE BY NATALENA KOROLEVA

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the main ideological-aesthetic, genre-style, historical and cultural features of Natalena Koroleva’s fiction. Historicism and Catholicism, noticeable in the writer’s prosaic works of different genres and styles, are considered the dominant elements of her artistic worldview and thinking. The analysis focuses on the writer’s three key interwar novels: "An Ancestor", "A Shadow’s Dream", "1313" and examines several aspects of their poetics. Koroleva’s historicism is noted for combining scientific (in particular, archeological) knowledge, religious and philosophical experience and an artistic intuition of the writer. The author’s relationship with Catholicism are defined by complexity and ambiguity – from absolutization to undermining of the Christian dogmas and appeal to the history of religious heresies (like the Cathars, Albigensians). Koroleva organically connected Christian mythology with the European cultural tradition as its integral part and understood Christianity as a fundamental basis for the European spiritual and cultural values. The writer’s beliefs in the interaction of history, religion, culture and literature affected a number of her literary texts, many of which are based on gospel stories, medieval mysteries and folk legends. Each of the mentioned works of Koroleva is perceived as a holistic artistic phenomenon linked to her other works and created on the basis of her research into ancient, medieval, and early modern history. The novel «An Ancestor» is viewed as the author’s individual-mythological vision of the family history and the work that, having absorbed various genre varieties (family chronicle, travel novel, historical novel), testified to the author’s attention to the social-cultural, historical, and religious-spiritual characteristics of a person of the early modern era. Koroleva’s novel "A Shadow’s Dream" is regarded as having a connection with the genre of an "archeological novel" ("The Emperor" by Georg Ebers is a particular example of the latter). The novel "1313" is perceived as the author’s attempt to artistically depict the motif of a man’s encounter with the devil in the moral, psychological, cultural, philosophical, and mythological contexts of medieval Europe. The historical and cultural content of Koroleva’s prose, its artistic, aesthetic and ideological potentials are additionally emphasized.