Coordinates of home: symbolic spaces in a novel by Victoria Amelyna «Home for the Dom»

Abstract

The article tells about the leading theme of modern Ukrainian literature — the reconstruction of individual historical memory. The author analyzes the symbolic image, which is a model of perception of one's own past — the image of the Home. The methodological strategy of the author is a philological analysis, combined with the thoughts of literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, historians, and others about the perception of the as a sacred place in the human mind of the 20–21th. The research is also aimed at comparing the patterns of perception of the past by the characters of Victoria Amelina’s Home for the Dom and Stanislav Lemom in the memoir High Castle. Intertextual reading of two works makes possible to distinguish a particular type of perception of the past and the as a meeting place of the past and the future. The author highlights two strategies in the perception of the Home. First: the home is like a geographic desert, part of the traumatic landscape. Such image of home is not united with common family memories. Second: the home is an integral part of the cultural and geographical landscape. He is a continuation of the I of the author or character in prose. On the basis of this classification, two types of conflict can be distinguished in contemporary Ukrainian prose dedicated to family history. To the first group belong those in which the plot conflict unfolds around the reconstruction of individual historical or family memory and the as a place of memory. The second type is represented by those in which the reconstruction of the notion of the is impossible due to the loss of a symbolic connection with the past, the formation of an ambivalent attitude to the as a symbolic space.