Eschatological myth in the novel works by E. Aipin

Abstract

The article represents the experience of scientific reading of the novel works by the major Khanty prose writer E. Aipin from the perspective of mythopoetics. Witnessing the global changes at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries and being acutely aware of the crisis nature of the era, the writer introduces in his novels a number of eschatological myths, existing in the culture of the Khanty people and the cultures of other peoples, into the field of his interpretations. The author correlates the crisis phenomena inherent in the social consciousness of the millennium and expressed in environmental, socio-political and spiritual-moral shifts with the “eternal plots” of eschatological mythology, thereby bringing the eventual focuses of artistic narration to the level of general cultural and generally significant problems. The actualization of the eschatological context of Aipin’s novels is facilitated by the frequent use of concepts and artistic signs of catastrophic semantics: fire (“Khanty, or the Star of the Dawn”), death, destruction (“Mother of God in the Bloody Snows”), global flood (“In Search of the First Earth”), etc. In the process of the author’s understanding of the role and place of man in the modern world, there is an expansion of the scale of eschatological issues from novel to novel: from the ethnic to the universal level.