Ch. Aitmatov and the Russian traditionalist prose of the 1960s–1970s (on the 95th anniversary of the writer’s birth)

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. Ch.T. Aitmatov (1928–2008) is a major writer whose work was originally associated with Kyrgyzstan, was widely known in the Soviet Union, and recognized by the world cultural community. His prose is associated with several directions and trends in Russian Soviet literature. The purpose of the study is to draw parallels between Aitmatov’s works of the 1960–1980s and Russian traditionalist literature of that time, to establish the degree of poetic “kinship” between phenomena belonging to different national cultures.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material is Ch. Aitmatov’s stories “My Poplar in a Red Scarf”, “Mother’s Field”, the novel “Stormy Stop”, F. Abramov’s novel “Home”, V. Astafiev’s stories, V. Shukshin’s stories. The main methods of studying the material are comparative typological, historical and genetic; a mythopoetic approach to the analysis of literary works is also used.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. It has been established that Ch. Aitmatov’s prose is related to “industrial literature”, to “lyrical prose”, to “youth literature”. The connections between Aitmatov’s stories and novels and “village prose” turn out to be closer. The desire to preserve memory, traditions, and archetypes of behavior characteristic of the centuries-old culture of the Kyrgyz people is of great importance for the heroes of Ch. Aitmatov’s stories and novels. This trend also characterizes Russian traditionalist literature of the 1960–1980s, which declared the need for a careful attitude towards Russian national traditions. In many respects, the images of the main characters and the mythological motifs of the works of Ch. Aitmatov and the Russian “villages” turn out to be consonant and comparable in a number of parameters. Significant similarities were revealed in the perception of the native land and fields in the works of the “villagers” and Ch. Aitmatov, in the depiction of ambiguous socio-ethical processes in Soviet society of the 1960–1980s, in the understanding of the processes of corrosion of a national character.CONCLUSION. Prose by Ch.T. Aitmatov is close to various currents of Russian literature of the twentieth century in its characteristic humanistic orientation, in its attention to the hero involved in solving acute social and ethical problems of the time. Ch. Aitmatov’s prose is characterized by a poetic “kinship” with the traditionalist direction of Russian literature, manifested in genre, composition, figurative, ideological analogies and correspondences between phenomena belonging to different national cultures. They are brought together by the image of the mother earth, an attempt to rehabilitate and preserve the archetypes of national ethics, to integrate them into modernity full of contradictions. It seems promising to further study the parallels between Ch. Aitmatov’s prose and Russian traditionalist literature in order to determine the national identity of the writers’ artistic worlds and clarify the origins of the commonality of their concepts of the world and man.