The genre of historical novels about the Great Patriotic War in the Mari literature in the first post-war years

Abstract

This article analyses the formation and development of the historical novel genre in the national literature in the first post-war period. The object of the study are the works of the Mari writers Nikandr Lekain «On Fire of the Great War» and Veniamin Ivanov «The Windstorm». National patriotic spirit, heroism, the determination of people to fight to the end come to the fore in N. Lekain’s work. The work does not have the main character who unites all the storylines; it presents the multinational face of the Soviet people through the individual actions of people of different generations. In V. Ivanov’s novel, the fate of the individualized personality, his inner experiences, comes to the forefront. The historical and typological method of research made it possible to identify general and specific features in the depiction of dramatic events of the Great Patriotic War in the Mari and Russian literatures. The problem of the formation of this genre in regional literary criticism is being considered for the first time. A comparative study of the literary prose of writers revealed that the expansion and deepening of the problematic and thematic range (the theme of rear everyday life in the countryside, the problem of desertion and betrayal, etc.) of the Mari literature of this period outlined certain shifts in the image of the inner world of the characters. There was a tendency of multifaceted disclosure of socio-historical and ideological factors of the personality formation, psychologically deep explanation of the motives of the heroes’ actions. N. Lekain and V. Ivanov managed to find those life conflicts that made it possible to psychologically accurate portray the dialectics of the human soul in the war, to comprehend the origins of the national-patriotic upsurge, to show the deep processes of their contemporary reality.