“The Gray House” by Mariam Petrosyan in the context of the literary tradition of magical realism

Abstract

The paper deals with a comprehensive analysis of the formal and substantive components of Mariam Petrosyan’s novel “The Gray House” (“The House in Which ...”). The publication of the novel in 2009 provoked extremely diverse criticism. The authors pay much attention to the artistic originality of the novel and substantiate that it can be classified among works written using the method of magical realism. At the beginning of the paper, the authors provide a review of the works devoted to the theoretical aspects of the method of magical realism. The article is based on the correlation between the “strange” (in the researchers’ opinion) poetry of M. Petrosyan and the specifi of the above-mentioned method, the peculiarities of the “magical language”, taking into account critical publications about the novel. The analysis of the specifics of the plot, composition, the conflict and represented characters makes it possible to consider M. Petrosyan’s work in the context of the above-mentioned literary tradition.