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RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism 2020 Vol 25 No 4 657-670
Вестник РУДН. Серия: Литературоведение. Журналистика http://j'literra£rTs-i3lri<tilc'isuTi
Современный литературный процесс Contemporary literary process
DOI 10.22363/2312-9220-2020-25-4-657-670 UDC 821.161.1
Research article / Научная статья
Translingual text within a meaning-generating context of Russian literature
Sheker A. Kulieva
Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University)
10 Miklukho-Maklaya St, bldg 2, Moscow, 117198, Russian Federation
Abstract. In this article, the translingual text in the aspect of its interconnection with the meaning-generating context of classical Russian literature is analyzed. The literary trans-lingualism is defined as the phenomenon of writers who create texts in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. This is an urgent problem for modern literary criticism, requiring an interdisciplinary approach to its study. Within the framework of translin-gualism theory, as the text is comprehended not only as a product of speech activity subjected to structural preparation. It turns into a zone of "cross-pollination" with multiple meanings, becomes a representative of cultures in their contamination, mutual repulsion, symbiosis, submission, adaptation. Intercultural communication within the literary text also affects the level of the intertext: the intertextual paradigm elements of various complexity (from selected intexts, unmodified reminiscences to expanded propositions) in a translingual text are often subject to the process of so-called intertextual acculturation, in which the intext is filled with ethnospecific linguistic and literary content. The material for the study is the literary cycle "Dreams of the Damned" ("Sny okayannykh") by the modern Kazakhstan writer A. Zhaksylykov. Some of the intertextual echoes of the cycle with canonical texts of classical Russian literature (works by Pushkin, Yesenin, Dostoevsky, etc.) are analyzed in order to trace the adaptation process of its key motives (the motive of "flight from people", the motive of wandering, the motive of the desert, the motive of the black man, etc.) to the Kazakh linguocultural and aesthetic reality. Using methods such as comparative analysis, linguopoetic commenting, intertextual analysis, the conclusion is made that an appeal to the literary works of the acquired language for a translingual author is necessary: they constitute his cognitive base, but at the same time undergo certain linguo-specific transformations, the result of which is generation of new images of the world.
Keywords: translingualism, meaning-generating context, intertext, intext, motive, Russian literature, Kazakh prose, A. Zhaksylykov
Conflicts of interest. The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
© Kulieva Sh.A„ 2020
(gv q I This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License https://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by/4.0/
Article history: received - 15 September 2020; revised - 15 September 2020; accepted - 12 October 2020.
For citation: Kulieva, Sh.A. (2020). Translingual text within a meaning-generating context of Russian literature. RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism, 25(4), 657-670. http://dx.doi.org/10.22363/2312-9220-2020-25-4-657-670
Транслингвальный художественный текст в смыслопорождающем контексте русской литературы
Ш.А. Кулиева
Российский университет дружбы народов
Российская Федерация, 117198, Москва, ул. Миклухо-Маклая, д. 10, корп. 2
Аннотация. В статье анализируется транслингвальный текст в аспекте его взаимосвязанности со смыслопорождающим («живым», по формулировке Ю. Кристевой) контекстом классической русской литературы. Термин «транслингвизм» подразумевает создание автором текста на языке, который не является для него этнически первичным. Это актуальная для современного литературоведения проблема, требующая междисциплинарного подхода к ее изучению. В рамках теории транслингвизма, как показывает анализ корпуса художественных произведений, текст перестает быть только продуктом речевой деятельности, подвергаемым структурной препарации. Он превращается в зону «перекрестного опыления» множественными смыслами, становится репрезентантом культур - их контаминации, взаимоотталкивания, симбиоза, подчинения, адаптации. Межкультурная коммуникация внутри художественного целого затрагивает и уровень интертекста: элементы интертекстуальной парадигмы различной сложности (от отдельных интекстов, немодифицированных реминисценций до развернутых пропозиций) в транслингвальном тексте зачастую подвержены процессу так называемой интертекстуальной аккультурации, при которой интекст наполняется этноспецифиче-ским содержанием. Материалом исследования послужил художественный цикл «Сны окаянных» современного казахстанского писателя А. Жаксылыкова. Рассмотрены некоторые интертекстуальные переклички цикла с произведениями классической русской литературы (текстами Пушкина, Есенина, Достоевского и др.), чтобы проследить процесс адаптации ее ключевых мотивов («бегства от людей», странничества, пустыни, черного человека и др.) к казахстанской лингвокультурной и эстетической реальности. Используя такие методы, как сравнительный анализ, лингвопоэтическое комментирование, интертекстуальный анализ, сделан вывод, что апелляция к литературным произведениям усвоенного языка для транс-лингвального автора необходима: они составляют его когнитивную базу, но в то же время подвергаются определенным лингвоспецифическим трансформациям, результатом которых становится генерация новых образов мира.
Ключевые слова: транслингвизм, смыслопорождающий контекст, интертекст, интекст, мотив, русская литература, казахстанская проза, А. Жаксылыков
Заявление о конфликте интересов. Авторы заявляют об отсутствии конфликта интересов.
История статьи: поступила в редакцию - 15 сентября 2020 г.; принята к публикации - 12 октября 2020 г.
Для цитирования: Kulieva Sh.A. Translingual text within a meaning-generating context of Russian literature // Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: Литературоведение. Журналистика. 2020. Т. 25. № 4. С. 657-670. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.22363/2312-9220-2020-25-4-657-670
Modern universal human culture at all levels of its embodiment from epis-temological that affects scientific research of various disciplines, to artistic one represented in the works of writers from different countries is characterized by openness, nonlinearity, and integrativity. The global picture of the world is based on the philosophy of instability with the idea of the multivariable universe laid down to it. From this position, the world represents a synergistic and dissipative system, the guarantee of the existence of which is its openness. It is natural that the development of science in the 21st century is taking place under the sign of interdisciplinary synthesis.
National fiction is becoming more and more cosmopolitan and is being created under the influence of multidirectional "forces" - a tendency to preserve ethnic authenticity and appeal to the world art field. A literary text, embodied in the mainstream of such an epistemological paradigm, turns into a "meeting point" for various cultures and mentalities. This, in turn, contributes to the formation of a new "image" of the world - the world of intercultural interaction. For writers who use multicultural codes in their work, a certain transposition is characteristic, i.e. existing both within one's own culture and outside it.
Aslan Zhaksylykov is one of the most significant translingual writers in Kazakhstan. S.G. Kellman defines literary translingualism as the phenomenon of writers who create texts in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. The multinational, multicultural, multilingual Post-Soviet space, in which Chingiz Aitmatov and Gennadii Aigi wrote in their native Kyrgyz and Chuvash, respectively, as well as Russian, is a natural incubator for translingual literature [1. P. 337]. The literary cycle "Dreams of the Damned" ("Sny okayan-nykh") [2], Zhaksylykov's largest work, is defined by critics and researchers as "a breakthrough into the future", and this characteristic is essential. In creating his artistic world, Zhaksylykov "departs" from the socialist realist paradigm due to its strict limitations. The approach to personality as the bearer of the social function, the absence of a metaphysical horizon, the dictate of ideological guidelines are rejected by the author as unacceptable creative coordinates.
Zhaksylykov is looking for a synthesis of realism and modernism; his heroes try to master an illogical and discrete world as Chaos and restore Harmony to it. In this respect as in the organization of the textual space, the work is "superimposed" on a new artistic reality - the semiotic field of postmodernism. According to N.L. Leiderman, postmodernism proceeds from the idea of acceptance and aesthetic legitimization of Chaos, which is what all the characters of the cycle strive for. Their mental and spiritual Being can be denoted by a word invented by D. Joyce - Chaosmos, the Cosmos generated by Chaos. Chaosmos "reveals the wholeness of the world in its breaks, connectivity in the conflict of opposites, stability in the very process of endless movement. Such Cosmos does not reconcile with Chaos, but orders it" [3. P. 48].
One of the "meaning-generating" forces of the artistic cycle "Dreams of the Damned" is Russian literature as a bearer of constant images and axiological guidelines.
The title of Aslan Zhaksylykov's cycle "Dreams of the Damned", which represents a global proposition of the entire novel space, carries two associative stimuli:
the concept of dream, which correlates with the whole corpus of texts in Russian literature, and the subjective damned, a generic characteristic of all the heroes of the poetic Universe.
Having received a textual "impulse", the perceiving consciousness of the reader is connected to the process of creative cooperation with the Author, it discovers in its own precedent base the points of possible intersections of the original text with predecessor texts. It is likely that the element damned will be deciphered by the addressee in the context of another work, where the same unit is present in a strong position - "Cursed Days" by I. Bunin; the explication of the inner form of the word is possible, as a result of which the crystallization of the biblical story about Cain will occur. In any case, the source text will undergo semantic transformations. Thus, without having read the works of Zhaksylykov, we are already doing significant inner work, because the cultural memory (otherwise, the cognitive base) of the individual creates a "background" for the subsequent interpretation of the text. In the direct analysis of the cycle novels, as more and more new connections are discovered, the work acquires even greater multi-dimensionality.
"It is only necessary for the reader to recognize the fragment, regardless of the degree of its reproduction as a stranger. Only in this case he will have associations that will enrich the author's text with the meanings of the source text. The transformation and formation of the meanings of the author's text is the main function of quotations" [4. P. 507].
Thanks to intertextual connections, the artistic whole acts as a "condenser of cultural memory" and "a generator of new meanings" (Y.M. Lotman); dialogue with the literary tradition "incorporates" the work into the established cultural paradigm.
It is especially important to emphasize that Zhaksylykov, as a bilingual author, is the bearer of an integrated linguistic consciousness. With the aesthetic and instrumental base of the Russian language to create a Text of high stylistic complexity, the Author preserves the "genetic core" of the native culture, which accumulates the archetype, axiology, mentality of the Kazakh ethnicity. In other words, "the writer thinks in the coordinates of one national culture, but in the language, in the speech forms of another national culture" [5. P. 50]. Thus, the created Text belongs to the multicultural phenomena appealing to both the world and Russian literary traditions.
We strive to show that a Kazakhstan writer, with the artistic codes of Russian literature, "sketches" them on the described world, structures it, leads it beyond his own culture to phenomena of a global nature.
Our goal is not so much a comparative analysis that reveals what is common and different in the artistic method of two (or more) authors, but the development of a textual precedent network "branched out" in the novels of the cycle. The presence of such a network, its "radius" can indicate the degree of cultural overlap of two artistic systems (Kazakh and Russian literature) and reveal some features of the integrated mental program, natural for the carriers of the Kazakh linguistic culture. Russian literature for the writers of Kazakhstan is both "canonical" and "their own", therefore, the appeal to it is meaningful and structurally natural (V.R. Amineva).
A. Zhaksylykov is a bilingual author; the national and authentic in his work is always "supported" by the context of Russian and world literature "interwoven" into the work at the level of themes, motives, philosophical paradigms, allusions, etc., that gives it multidimensionality and formalization.
According to H.G. Gadamer, "here the being of the world is a linguistic being". The very nature of Homo Loquens defines his life as continuous engagement in dialogue: "Life is by nature dialogical. To live means to participate in a dialogue: to question, listen, respond, agree, etc. A person participates in this dialogue with his whole life... " [6. P. 329]. This thesis is also true for the dialogue of literatures.
Each piece of art is antinomical in nature. On the one hand, this is a fragment of the individual author's and linguistic picture of the world determined by ethno-specific features; on the other hand, a part of the global intertext inscribed in the semiosphere, or, according to R. Bart, the "text echo chamber" [7]. The presence of a variety of intertextual links, while not representing artistic integrity, however, gives the possibility of a deeper reading of the work, denotes cultural codes and increases the interpretative potential of the text.
Intertext is a paradigmatic phenomenon. This is a structure of a diachronic order, which is distinguished by asyntagmatism (there are no rules in following the subtexts in chronological terms) and anonymity (unlike the subtext, the intertext does not have a specific author). According to V.I. Tyupa approach, the unity of poetics in this case should be sought not in the structural indicators of the work, but in the object-semantic unity of a certain cultural topos. Such toponyms can be geographic objects of high cultural significance (Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Siberia, etc.) or symbolic complexes and archetypes (desert, sea, forest). Thus, the analysis of the mythological substrate that makes up the mythological tectonics of literary texts, united according to some criterion, becomes productive [8].
Let us consider as an "intertextual locus" the desert topos, the most important "metaphysical zone" in the life of Jean, the hero of "Singing Stones" novel (the first one of the cycle).
In the Russian literary tradition, the hypertext "desert" has different semantic content. In Christian culture, it goes back to biblical stories (the transition of the Israeli people through the desert to the Promised Land, the divine message to Moses, the trials of the prophets, etc.).
In the texts of the Old Testament, this is a geographically real desert with hot sand, scorching sun, lack of water. Natural parameters make the desert a place physically and physiologically difficult for humans; thus, the geographic archeseme is explicated by means of potential connotations such as "place of testing", "place of communion with God", "place of solitude". In hagiology, according to N.G. Fedoseenko, the desert is symbolically connected with the "pre-created world", the virgin mother. The desert tests a person, turns him to the state of "primordial innocence" through conscious austerity.
Corpus of texts of Russian literature of the 19th-21st centuries allows revealing the following complex of differentiations in the "desert" hypertext: 1) geographical object; 2) the place of physical testing of a person; 3) a sacred place of solitude, closeness to God; 4) a place of spiritual cleansing; 5) the place of temptation;
6) the place of initiation in the life of the hero and his subsequent transformation;
7) Purgatory [9].
The semantics of "solitude" reveals the choice of Jean, the hero of the novel "Singing Stones" who "denies" the city and strives to live in a small house in nature. While the "external person" (with his social position, behavior, etc.) undergoes degradation, becomes a vagrant, the "internal" one (according to E. Etkind) subconsciously seeks purification and spiritual rebirth. He sees "movement" (evolution) alone:
Every movement is based on the world emptiness <...>.
More and more I liked to be alone. I locked the door with two locks, drew the curtains on all windows, except for the one in the office, tightened the taps tightly so that the tapping of drops on the sink would not annoy the ear. When you are alone long enough and obsessive restless thoughts are forgotten, an inaudible and subtle movement begins around you. Your whole being is permeated with the feeling of the deepest inexpressible mystery of being [2. P. 60].
The motive of "escape from people" is traditional for Russian literature and in this case is used by the author as a meaning-generating stimulus. According to V.I. Kuleshov, all-romantic tradition (in the world cultural space "Atal", "Rene", "Paul and Virginia", "Corinna", "Jean Sbogar", Byron's "Gyaur", "Corsair", etc.) exposes the entire modern civilization, defined as urbanistic in its antihumanity (it is no coincidence that the significant cycle of E. Verharne will later bear the name of "Octopus Cities").
In Russian literature, the main "adepts" of this tradition are first V. Zhukov-sky, then to a greater extent A. Pushkin and M. Lermontov. A. Pushkin's heroes "break with society", flee into an exotic environment for themselves. They always have "two biographies", "civilized" and "new", created in a different life context. As V.I. Kuleshov notes, Pushkin's heroes in such conditions are "defeated by reality". For Zhaksylykov's hero, voluntary flight also becomes a global Trial situation. However, the "external" plot does not coincide with the complex of internal motives of the hero, which, in turn, "stratifies" the narrative. For the physical "manifestation" of Jean, the desert becomes a place of hard labor and bodily trials:
I looked around the deserted, overgrown with chengel and caragan banks, and the familiar bitterness scorched, burned my soul. Brown cliffs, dazzling rookeries of round stones, hot sandy slopes, indifferent sky tormented me with their lifeless appearance. The oppressive heat, which, probably, because of its density, could be touched with your fingers, could drive you crazy in a day [2. P. 28].
For the spiritual it is a desirable place of solitude, purification.
In the preromantic tradition of Russian literature (see, for example, Zhu-kovsky's translation of "The Hermit"), the desert is a place of "escape from people". Pushkin "endows" it with sacredness and geographic specifics. In the poem "The Prophet" this topos is presented as a pre-created world, a "gloomy desert" without people and without light. Thus, symbolically, this is the "beginning of beginnings". It is this semantics that gives us the opportunity to delve into the unconscious of the hero of "Singing Stones":
The steep, sun-scorched bank of the Tyshkan river. For several days I wandered along the dry river bed, collected patterned, sometimes amazingly beautiful pellets in a canvas bag in the hope of finding the coveted jade [2. P. 27].
It is noteworthy that the hero's actions can be described as "picking up stones", which on the subtext level connotes with Solomon's "Time to collect stones" (a verse semantically related to the preceding "Time to throw stones").
In the accepted interpretation, "picking up stones" marks the process of restoration, creation from the beginning. Thus, we can decipher the symbolism of the desert by A. Zhaksylykov as "a place of return to the origins and rebirth". This, however, does not exhaust the semantics of Zhaksylykov's "desert". If Pushkin's intext allows us to consider it as a "pre-created world", then Lermontov's ("The Demon") inhabits life ("The Elders Tell Stories to Children").
It is worth noting that it is the old man and the child who live in the desert with the hero Jean, contributing to his initiation. The old man becomes a subjective representation of the motive of choice/temptation, pushing Jean to commit suicide (the first of the deadly sins). The baby marks a new life. Jean's initiation thus involves a choice between life and death:
The razor hung over the fluttering vein... It was a terrible moment. The icy eternity was shattered by the mouse-like creak of the opening door. A barefoot toddler, the old man's grandson, was standing under the cone of light on the porch. "Baby, boy, shepherd boy", I suddenly remembered, and like a bright burn swept through my heart. The fingers unclenched, and the razor slipped somewhere into the darkness [2. P. 73].
The lexical series "baby, boy, shepherd boy" becomes an allusion to the biblical shepherd, the Son of God, the incarnation of God on Earth. Jean's desert asceticism ends with unity with the Universe and the beginning of a new stage of life.
Thus, due to intertextual connections, the artistic whole acts as both an accumulator of already established meanings and a generator of new ones.
Black man's motive: meaning-generating stimulus. In the "dialogue" of texts, each work becomes a replica, a reaction to one or another artistic "stimulus". The inclusion and further transformations of the "alien" word endow the work with a semantic plurality due to its correlation with other texts in the intertextual space of culture.
"Each text is a new fabric woven from old quotations, and in this sense each text is an intertext, while other texts are present in it at different levels in more or less recognizable forms" [7. P. 88].
The elements of the intertext perform a constructive (text-forming) function in the postmodernism. In this case, the new text not only assimilates the pretext, but it is also built as its interpretation.
The novel "Singing Stones" is characterized by a "cluster" subjective organization. The main character Jean acts as a plot-forming attractor, while the rest of the subjects (Arman, Ainura, Baksy, Shepherd) are distributed in accordance with the parameters of similarity and distance. At the same time, the minimum "biographical distance" between the characters often reveals the maximum degree of difference in their life attitudes (oppositions Jean - Arman, Jean - Ainur). Thus, Ainur is the wife of the protagonist, Arman is his closest friend, but their life orientations do not coincide and do not even intersect. The cluster ("grape") principle of organization presupposes the semantic conditioning of each "branch" by its core; thus, each of the novel subjects is associated with the personality of the central hero, Jean, being his kind of semantic "increment".
Thus, the figure of Arman can be considered as a component of the "Jean -Arman" dichotomy, where the latter acts not only as the antipode, but also as a "double" of the protagonist, the dark, destructive side of his personality. The Black man motive "sounds" especially in the explication of Arman's image, which is significant for both world and Russian classical literature. The details of his portrait like "poisonous smile", "waddling pose" and "ironic look" seem to be interesting. Behind the external attributes of the character ("a thin graceful figure", "hair shining with a resinous fresh shine"), his deep hypostasis is visible:
Arman winked at me and tried to smile, but the heavy pupils did not obey him. A strange and unknown man looked at me unkindly with these darkened eyes as if at point-blank range [2. P. 21].
This is how Arman appears after the "pearl temptation", when the jewels he brought become stumbling blocks between Jean and Ainur. Increasingly, the author focuses the reader's attention on epithets related to the plane of darkness ("tarry hair", "darkened eyes", "darkened face"). Arman becomes the stimulus of Jean's darkest inner feelings:
Annoyance washed over me in such a dark wave that I felt sick. I suddenly felt a strong hatredfor Arman. I could not refrain from the darkest feelings, the most embittered thoughts... [2. P. 37].
The following fragment is significant for interpretation of Arman's character: "The devil is in the man himself", Arman once said. I remember that Arman's lean, handsome face somehow darkened badly [2. P. 36].
And there is again a darkened face, which is significant color detail, associated with the archetype of shadow, one of the most important concepts of world culture. The works of Marie-Louise von Franz, a world expert in the field of psychological interpretation of literary texts, are devoted to a detailed study of the phenomenon of the shadow. According to the concept of Franz, the Shadow is the opposition of the individual and the collective that is initially embedded in the subconscious of the individual, objectively existing sides of the personality that were not included in its ego-complex for some reason.
Zhaksylykov creates a character who is dissonant with society and himself; the specificity of the character brings Jean closer to representatives of the traditional Russian literature personality type - "extra person", which opens with the images of immature man, Eugene Onegin and Pechorin. It is noteworthy that researchers (V.I. Kuleshov) call Onegin "a restless wanderer who despises society and carries its evil in himself'. This definition is also true for Jean. The introduction of a demonic motive to the hero's ego-complex is not only a psychologization of his character, but also a comprehension of the metaphysical level of his life.
The motive of the "black man" originated in pre-Christian society and incorporated many elements of subsequent epochs (the image of the devil, the motif of long-suffering, the parable of the prodigal son).
In culture, the collective Shadow is manifested in various religious systems through the belief in the existence of the Devil and demons [10].
A. Zhaksylykov's "black man" at the conceptual level is close to the representations of this motive in Pushkin's "little tragedy" "Mozart and Salieri", Yese-nin's similarly-named poem, and - in part - Dostoevsky's "The Double-Ganger".
The confrontation between Mozart and Salieri is a "hidden" confrontation, since the inequality of talent is not directly indicated by any of the characters (After all, he (Beaumarchais) is a genius just like you and me). Mozart is the embodiment of absolute natural genius, "the ideal of the creator" (You, Mozart, are God, and you don't even know it); Salieri with his undoubted flair for talent is the "pathologist from art" (I have destroyed music like a corpse. I tested harmony with algebra).
The heroes presented as a dyad are in dialectical unity (as a stimulus to the creative process - and a reaction to it).
If Salieri "tested harmony with algebra", then Arman is one of those who "tested the law of being with his forehead and stomach" [2. P. 37]. Salieri says that Mozart is "unworthy of himself'. Arman calls Jean "a complete idiot". The allusion in this case is not attributed. It is built as a reproduction "of meta-science" (the only direct reference to Pushkin's tragedy is Zhaksylykov's introduction of syntactically identical structure "tested the law of being with his forehead and stomach"). Further "semantic crosses" are associated with the texts of Yese-nin and Dostoevsky.
Yesenin's "Black Man" is synthetic work in philosophical and literary terms, which has absorbed the ideological core of many previous texts, mainly Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri". Both texts are combined thematically: they explicate the theme of the Genius (poet) in art in its indissoluble connection with the "dark" side of life and own personality. The soul of Yesenin's lyrical hero is "tormented by insomnia" and "black thoughts". "The country of birch calico" in the Black man's remarks turns into "the Country of scoundrels". We can find the same in Zhaksylykov's text: Arman argues that "life is truly beautiful when you drive a white Mercedes and pretty girls smile from the sidewalks" [2. P. 40]; otherwise - "All Kazakhstan is a landfill, a dump, a sump, or a drain pit!" [Ibid.]. Yesenin's Black man is not just the embodiment of "villainy", but also the hypostasis of the lyrical hero himself, which he "deals" with a cane in the poem's final.
The black man of Zhaksylykov's hero is more "subjective". The motive is implemented in the text in the image of a specific character - Arman. Like Yese-nin's Black man, Arman (his words and deeds) "torture" Jean with insomnia, awaken "the darkest feelings" in him, make him feel hatred for reality. However, Jean is not rated by the author as a Poet (The book of poems that I published was not noticed even by critics); his figure, rather, embodies the idea of a person seeking Truth (Thinker). Yesenin's Black man "reads the burial service for a drunkard"; Arman calls Jean "a dead fool".
Arman emphasizes that "he has something to be envied" (genius) and tries to take it away by destroying his life. Moreover, Arman has the features of another Black man - Golyadkin's double from Dostoevsky's work. Golyadkin and his double are the extreme points of the opposition; the second one implements all the characteristics and functions (personal and social) that are not available to the first one: self-confidence, "cheeky behavior", etc. Like Golyadkin's double, Arman is the mirror opposite of the main character, which is repeatedly emphasized in the text. Jean has a "difficult level of life", while Arman is really wealthy; Jean is not good-looking in appearance, while Arman is very attractive, "cheeky
and ironic". His attitude to Jean is most often marked as irony or disdain. However, the main difference between Jean and his antagonist is basically metaphysical.
Thus, Arman confirms the primordial nature of the devil in human nature:
"And this devil is the flesh", he continued, "because he is the body itself, his essence, he is insatiable always and everywhere. He is the internal fire of thirst and desire itself. No matter how much you give him, it's not enough. This demon of desire is invincible, he truly dominates the outside world. As long as we are in the flesh, we fully belong to him" [2.P. 36].
Jean characterizes Arman's words as "an apologetics of dark instincts" that can justify any meanness, the most extreme evil. This is a reinterpretation of Dos-toevsky's "thesis" that "if there is no God, then everything is allowed". Thus, the characters enter into an ontological dispute, where Arman takes obviously the "dark side", thus becoming the embodiment of the demonic principle. The epithet "dark eyes" (Arman turned a sideway gaze on me, flashing with dark attentive eyes) once again connects the hero's image with the shadow symbolism. Recalling the history of their relationship, Jean notes that after marrying Ainur, "they had a falling out", and "a demon interposed between them".
Arousing the blackest feelings in the hero (How many times did this black fire choke me when I tossed and turned on the mat on sleepless nights, not knowing where to put my buzzing head. Arman, why do you have such cynical cruelty?), Arman performs a compensatory function, becomes a "black man" for Jean. Their painful communication forces Jean to mimic, bringing in him the "art of the actor and mime" to perfection. Let us recall that hypocrisy is one of the "charges" brought by the Black man against the hero of Yesenin's text: "In thunderstorms, in storms, / In cold life, / With heavy losses / And when you are sad, / To seem smiling and simple - / The highest art in the world".
Eventually, Arman's treacherous act of seducing the main character's wife becomes critical:
What happened to me later at the height of the second floor was too cruel and painful to be able to remain the same person after that. My soul was burned and charred on those rings... It was not a man who fell from those rings, but a silent dead stone.
Yes. The old man did not accidentally leave a sharp razor made of German steel on the mat [2. P.72].
The turning point in the fate of the protagonist, the state of "suspension" (literal in our case) brings the Shadow to the fore. And this is the whole paradox of the situation: the destroyed life of Jean marks his victory over the "black man", i.e. Arman. However, the path of spiritual metamorphosis is long and full of twists and turns.
Recalling his relationship with his wife before her betrayal, Jean says that the words they "gave each other were the first words in the world".
"In the beginning there was a word" - this could be a synonymous transformation of the text, revealing all divinity ("and the word was with God") and the purity of their union, in which Jean and Ainur were the Old Testament Adam and Eve (the most recurrent motives of the fragment are virgin nudity, primordial innocence).
Recreating the picture of a family idyll, Zhaksylykov "weaves" a reminiscence of "white nights" into the narrative, redirecting the reader to Dostoevsky's story: "How deep and heartfelt were those white nights, inspired by us!" This reference is substantively and narratively necessary, as well as justified as an additional meaning-generating impulse.
The protagonist of Dostoevsky's "The White Nights" is a Dreamer. The type of hero that Dostoevsky worked through during this period of his work is largely autobiographical; it is known that the writer conceived the novel "The Dreamer" (1870s), which never came true.
As conceived by Dostoevsky, the Dreamer is a special kind of "superfluous person" who experiences the tragedy of "forced inaction".
"How many people have finally found their work?" says Dostoevsky in the essays "Saint Petersburg Chronicle" in 1847 - "<...> Something that is called dreaminess arises little by little in the characters, hungry for activities, hungry for immediate life, hungry for reality, but weak, feminine, delicate, and man finally becomes not a man, but a strange creature of neuter gender - a dreamer...".
Despite the author's idea of the "sinfulness" of life, divorced from reality, Dostoevsky emphasizes its immutable creative value and sincerity. The Dreamer's love for Nastenka is unselfish and filled with reverence.
(Note that Jean, the hero of Zhaksylykov, is in awe of his wife:
I feared, I prayed over your body, always innocent, always virgin. I marveled at the father-creator of such beauty and babbled thanksgiving words with delight with my numb tongue [2. P. 39]).
Analyzing Dostoevsky's story, we should point to its leitmotif: the fantastic, which is "saturated" with reality; the line between the modes of reality is blurred and mutually permeable. Consequently, the Dreamer exists not only in his own spiritual dimension, but also in a specific urban space - Saint Petersburg. The level of the hero's perception of the city is significant: he is benevolent; the "City of Peter" is not felt by the Dreamer as a "smoky cage". The Dreamer's attitude to the world is altruistic; in this aspect, he departs from both Byron's and Pushkin's hero, who despises his environment.
The Dreamer's idyll is "interrupted" by a failed happiness - Nastenka leaves him for the sake of her "earthly" lover - the Dweller.
Artistically, the Dweller is the Dreamer's counter - mask, which marks the character's belonging to the material world. Nastenka takes the transposition in the story. Being a person who is not devoid of conscience and spiritual values, she still leaves the Dreamer, defining her own act as "betrayal". Nastenka is a woman-girl (the lexemes that characterize her are "little mouth", "tiny hands", "doll face", etc.); she combines ingenuousness with practicality, reaching the point of prudence.
Zhaksylykov draws an implicit parallel between all three characters. Unselfish and sincere idealist Jean is the embodiment of the Dreamer type, eventually completely destroyed; while Ainur has Nastenka's character, which is intensified towards greater mercantilism; Dweller is a kind of Arman's correlation.
However, Dostoevsky's Dreamer, unlike the hero of "The Singing Stones", managed to preserve not only his exalted and benevolent attitude to the world,
but also his pure love for Nastenka, despite the fact that her leaving darkened his vision of life (My nights ended in the morning. It wasn't a good day. It was raining and the rain was beating against my windows; it was dark in the room, it was cloudy outside).
Jean has similar feelings:
The barn is overgrown with moss of desolation. Hands hug the ground and cry from the cold. The longing of loneliness wanders in the chest [2. P. 39].
The end of Dostoevsky's story summarizes that even one minute of bliss is enough for a whole human life (these lines are correlated with the epigraph from the poem "The Flower" by I. Turgenev: "...Or was it created in order to stay at least a moment in the neighborhood of your heart?..."). One minute is enough for Zhaksylykov's hero, but in the opposite of its biographical significance:
Just one minute turned me into a pitiful, despicable creature. The wind of violent change drove me like a tumbleweed. A stream of malice, bile, and hatred were beating out of me... I turned into a completely different creature, being fierce and vile as a hyena. Yes, you did get your way.
Jean's entire family life turned out to be a "dream" and "illusion"; Ainur did not have true love for him (Nastenka, on the contrary, loved the Dreamer -but loved "in her own way").
The "paradise" of marriage, destroyed by the "deceived" Eva-Ainur, opened the way for "the knowledge of good and evil" for Jean; this "plot knot" turns out to be "Gordian": the protagonist will have to determine his place in the world.
Arman, who destroyed family happiness (Zhaksylykov again turns to the Old Testament, mentioning "heavenly meadows") symbolically becomes a tempting serpent, that is, the Devil, which once again emphasizes his functional connection with the Shadow, realized in the motive of the Black Man. However, this function is not so much destructive as initiatory:
You destroyed me, settled the argument for your own benefit, but were you able to delete the question that I was carrying with my existence? A person can be humiliated, disgraced, thrown out in the mud, even killed in extreme cases, but can you completely dismiss the indisputable fact that he is completely different from your creature, and this is the whole challenge of space for you? [2. P. 82].
The shadow thus becomes a "life-creating" sign that the main character's psyche creates for its own purification and self-affirmation. Maria-Louise von Franz notes that "there is a state of suspension, which everything has stopped in. The ego is in indecision between 'yes' and 'no', and the person is tormented, because the flow of life has stopped and all efforts are fruitless. The ego surrenders, obeying something objective, a sign from Above that points to the truth" [10. P. 352].
The meeting with the Shadow, embodied in the image of the Black Man, becomes the initiator for the protagonist. Acceptance of the dark sides of the personality, their consistent understanding are necessary conditions for the transformation of the main character and his spiritual evolution. And if in the Russian literary tradition a meeting with a shadow (a black man) ends in madness or death (Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri", Gogol's "Portrait", Dostoevsky's "Double", etc.), it marks a rebirth and continuation of the life path on its new turn for A. Zhak-sylykov's hero.
The artistic text is, in the words of P. Volkova, "a bridge across the abyss", where the entire human culture appears as an Abyss. "Passing through it", the Reader "sees" not only the hero of particular work, but also its "cultural counterparts"; hears the "chorus" of predecessors behind the voice of the Author-luminary; attributes the Text to previously known ideological and artistic "parameters", making it "convex". So, the Text is a carrier of cultural memory and at the same time a generator of new meanings.
The Author's appeal to a limited range of pretexts is due to his intention "to be understood" - Esse est percipi.
It is quite understandable that in the designated "range" consists of the canonical literature names the author is focused, in particular, on the "recognition" of someone else's voice by the Reader, therefore, this "voice" should be a textual precedent for his cognitive base - a set of knowledge that is mandatory for the carrier of this linguistic culture.
Russian literature, due to certain historical factors, became a "content and structurally obligatory" cognitive foundation for all the peoples of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union; by the 20th century, its development by many foreign cultures had already taken place. Thus, there is a situation of "doom" to dialogue, which still has a huge constructive potential. A bilingual writer connected simultaneously to two domains native and Russian literature as compulsory translates elements of his own culture like national images of the world into "outer space" (through the Russian language). The inter-literary dialogue contributes to the establishment of strong cross-cultural cooperation. It is no coincidence that A. Zhaksylykov, the author of the novel series "The Dreams of the Damned", was recognized as a gold laureate of the "Golden Pen of Russia" competition for his enormous contribution to the literature of Kazakhstan, for the creation of priceless pieces of work. The writer managed to create a text that is equally significant for representatives of different linguistic cultures, thanks to the configuration of such two concept spheres as Kazakh and Russian ones.
Zhaksylykov is truly original. The author starts from the facts of Kazakhstan's history, but places them in a multi-level meaning-generating context, in which each artistic element acquires ontological significance. The ideological and symbolic concentration of images, stylistic complexity, organization of narrative levels presented in the cycle have no analogues in the Kazakh prose. The complicated architectonics of the text, its "mental split" and at the same time continuality are isomorphic to the Author's idea of the existential continuity of all things, of Consciousness beyond limitations, of the continuity of Being.
According to Zhaksylykov, humanity is a paralogical phenomenon in the History of the Earth ("paralogy" is a synthesis of paradox and analogy, connection and contradiction, parallel and conflict). Being a collective form of "living life", Humanity is the only one of all biological species that, reaching the apotheosis of its development at the next stage of evolution, begins to strive for self-destruction, leveling the excess of its own "living matter". "Local" and "global" Fratricide is the result of this Program.
References
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[9] Belomorskie stariny i duhovnye stihi: Sobranie A.V. Markova [White Sea Antiquities and Spiritual Poems: Collection of A.V. Markov]. (2002). Saint Petersburg, Dmitrij Bu-lanin Publ. (In Russ.)
[10] Franz, M.-L. fon. (2010). Fenomeny Teni i Zla v volshebnyh skazkah [The Phenomena of Shadow and Evil in a Fairy Tales]. Moscow, Progress Publ. (In Russ.)
Bio note:
Sheker A. Kulieva, Candidate in History, Docent of the Department of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University).
Сведения об авторе:
Кулиева Шекер Авдыевна, кандидат исторических наук, доцент кафедры иностранных языков факультета гуманитарных и социальных наук Российского университета дружбы народов.
