CC BY
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DOI 10.54770/20729316-2022-2-297
А. V. Markov (Moscow), S. Kamilova (Toshkent, Uzbekistan)
VALENTIN RASPUTIN AND UZBEK LITERATURE: REASSEMBLING VILLAGE PROSE AS NATION BUILDING
Abstract. Reception of Valentin Rasputin's prose can be traced in Uzbek literature at different levels: the plot (the situation of war and women's loneliness; the gap between generations), the characters (the opposition of tradition and modern people), ideas (adaptation of philosophical and ethical concepts of moral judgment and moral immortality) and the main conflict (an integral personality as rooted in tradition vs. a damaged personality as devoid of roots), which can unfold within an individual hero. However, the contrast between the village and the city is replaced here by the contrast between the generic as traditional and the individual as a threatening break with the ancestors and the disappearance of historical memory. If for Rasputin the village remained a place of moral patterns of behavior, albeit partially destroyed by modernization, and public discussion was to limit the effects of modernization, then in Uzbek prose, which consciously reassembles Rasputin's plots, the reality of the village (kishlak) and the city is dependent on the reality of the home, as only space of conflict. The Uzbek writers do not consider modernization as a main threat, but rather the loss of ancestral memory, depicting the situation not in a dramatic way, but in a tragic way, as an internal conflict within an individual. We cite numerous examples to show how the symbols, images, and plot developments invented under the possible influence of Rasputin take on a philosophical rather than a social meaning. By doing so, the Uzbek literature should have rather affirmed the mission of the writer as a prophet capable of linking the idea of personality and the idea of generic memory, and thereby brought the discussion to the level of a general theory of personality and the general fate of Uzbekistan as an independent cultural world, in which the opposition of city and village is not so essential in comparison with a common national identity.
Key words: socialist realism; perestroika; national literature; village prose; Valentin Rasputin; Uzbek literature; national project; invention of tradition.
А. В. Марков (Москва), С. Э. Камилова (Ташкент, Узбекистан)
Валентин Распутин и узбекская литература: пересборка деревенской прозы как нациестроительство
Аннотация. Рецепция прозы Валентина Распутина прослеживается в узбекской литературе на различных уровнях: сюжета (ситуация войны и женского одиночества; разрыв поколений), образов героев (противопоставление людей традиции и людей модерна), идей (адаптация философских и этических концепций нравственного суда и нравственного бессмертия) и основного конфликта (полноценной личности как укорененной в традиции и ущербной личности как лишенной корней), который может развертываться и внутри отдельного героя. Но при
Новый филологический вестник. 2022. №2(61). --
этом противопоставление деревни и города заменяется противопоставлением родового как традиционного и индивидуального как грозящего разрывом с родом и исчезновением исторической памяти. Если для Распутина деревня оставалась местом нравственных моделей поведения, хотя и частично разрушенных модернизацией, и общественная дискуссия должна была ограничить эффекты модернизации, то в узбекской прозе, сознательно ориентирующейся на прозу Распутина, реальность кишлака и города зависима от реальности дома, который и оказывается пространством конфликта. Как угрозу узбекские писатели рассматривают не саму модернизацию, а утрату родовой памяти, изображая ситуацию не драматически, а трагически, как конфликт внутри личности. В статье на множестве примеров разобрано, как созданные под возможным влиянием Распутина символы, образы и сюжетные решения приобретают не социальный, а философский смысл. Тем самым эта литература должна была скорее утвердить миссию писателя как пророка, способного связать идею личности и идею родовой памяти, и тем самым вывести дискуссию на уровень общей теории личности и общей судьбы Узбекистана как самостоятельного культурного мира, в котором противопоставление города и деревни не так существенно в сравнении с общей национальной идентичностью.
Ключевые слова: социалистический реализм; перестройка; национальная литература; деревенская проза; Валентин Распутин; узбекская литература; национальный проект; конструирование традиции.
Historical dynamics of the development of Russian and Uzbek prose in the last three decades of the twentieth century in many ways reflects the general order of socio-cultural changes that distinguish the stages of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as having a different set of historical and cultural characteristics. If at the beginning of that period there was a coexistence of Russian and Uzbek cultures in a single system of aesthetic values and artistic principles of socialist realism supported by the institutional and ideological stability of the common Soviet state, the end of the process is the splitting of this unity into national communities, accompanied by irreversible social processes, which required a different understanding of common cultural traditions. But looking closely, as we have already said, not only is the 1970s different from 1990s, but the 1970s are also different from the 1980s, and this difference, although partially described by the pre-perestroika and perestroika trends, is not exhausted by them, especially if we look at the comparative situation in the RSFSR and UzSSR of that time.
We assume that both the commonality of the Soviet literary field and the dynamics of its differentiation and disintegration were determined not so much by institutional movements within literary production as by certain psychological foundations, by that mode of psychologicalization of narrative, which determined both the reactions of the readership and the search for some new foundations of the aesthetic, already different in the different Soviet republics. This process turns out to be dialectical: the commonality of experience contributes to the search for new variants of aesthetic expression, including those associated with national traditions, while these variants of expression can be recognized as fundamental due to the relative homogeneity of the Soviet reading audience.
Whereas the perception of poetry could still be linked to a multitude of contingencies, including generational self-identification and fashion, the perception of prose was dictated by school skills of prose reading and writing and immersion in the general field of consumption of prose texts, primarily newspaper and magazine texts, and was therefore homogeneous: it was known what readers' expectations from plots and characters, and varying them or the appearance of new characters proved an experiment that mobilized the readership, forced to pay more attention to the social design of the Soviet life.
At the level of poetics analysis, this can be described as the fact that form (at the level of both genre, style, and composition) has become predetermined by content. As asserts Bazhenov cited by Bondarenko, "the form of prose is renewed not by the author's special efforts (if we speak of great achievements in literature), but by the content of the thing itself <...> Each task is dictated to the artist by the content of the maturing thing" [Бондаренко 1990, 36]. The word thing should not be understood here in the sense of the mere structural organization of the text or the material specificity of the reality represented. It is better to understand the thing as a system of psychological reactions to what is happening, in which moral attitudes, social habits of action and aesthetic preferences converge.
In this sense, the psychologization of prose in the so-called era of timeless-ness of the 1970s can be explained by the normalization of the 1960s discoveries about the fields of social experience and related directions. The 1960s opened up new types of social-psychological prose, such as urban and rural as poles [Разувалова 2015]. The literary process of the 1970s is then easiest to understand as a search for thematic and aesthetic commonalities between these types in order to keep readerly attention on the prose and maintain regular interaction, in the form of readerly inquiry and writerly response.
This "normalization," inaugurated by the events of 1968 in Soviet foreign policy, can be described as the unifying pressure of censorship, together with the need to maintain a wide audience for prose, or, in accordance with the dialectic suggested at the beginning of the article, as a differentiation of the way of speaking to the reader [Столетова 2019]. G. L. Nefagina, detailing the normalization of the 1970s, aptly notes: "The literary process included 'village prose', 'military prose', 'literature of moral quests', prose of 'forty-somes', and, of course, the officious 'secretarial' prose that formed a whole strand. Writers who existed in official literature, but did not want to support ideological myths, developed a special artistic language. It could come in the form of 'psychologically sharpened' prose, 'conditionally metaphorical', 'situation of choice', etc., in any case making the reader not a contemplative, but a person thinking, doing, able to understand the subtext" [Нефагина 1998, 8-9].
While this observation is somewhat schematic, it is very productive for creating a three-level scheme. At the first level is the setting of the author, who is responsible for the psychological provision of the images, taking into account the reader's requests, one might say, conducts these expectations [Степанова 2016]. At the second level is the hero's own logic, which combines
normativity inherited from Socialist Realism, realistic representativeness, and philosophical-psychological typicality [Ковтун 2011]. We might say that here there is a movement from normativity through a certain directness of the literature of the sixties to the typicality associated with neo-modernism, a search for philosophical and existential formulas for man. Finally, on the third level there is what might be called the spirit of the era, the general frame or context. It is not simply the mode in which the reader perceives the narrative, but the mode in which the reader perceives the very time in which he lives.
Let us consider how this three-tier system manifested itself in Russian and Uzbek literature. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union issued passports to residents of rural areas. A powerful exodus of young people to the city in search of a better life began. By the end of the 70s, the RSFSR formed the type of new city dwellers, those who came from the countryside. Such people were naive, trusting, living by certain natural perceptions. Their simplicity and otherness prevented them from adapting to city life. The break with the usual way of life and the inability to adapt were superimposed on other traumas of the war and postwar years, and all these circumstances made modernity incomprehensible to these people in general. But besides incomprehension, the specificity of consumer society education in the USSR was characterized by an increase in selfishness. After all, these processes took place not against the background of a baby boom, as in the USA, but on the contrary, against a demographic crisis, including one connected with the new wave of industrialization, geographical mobility, and a combination of the hypertrophied bourgeois ideal of well-being with insufficient opportunities for raising children, which also determined the colonial overtones [Смола 2017, 436] of some of the publicistic continuers of village prose in the RSFSR, something we do not find in Uzbek literature.
The main task of village prose was to show the conflict between the former harmony / integration (Russian: "лад") of village life and the disintegration due to the complex and contradictory processes of the second, already stagnant time wave of Soviet industrialization. Village writers like V. Rasputin, V. Shuk-shin, V. Belov, V. Astafyev, F. Abramov et al. showed this conflict by means of simple oppositions: "fabulous" speech of villagers and colorless meager speech of city dwellers, the intelligence, cunning and tenacity of villagers and spiritual poverty, formulaic thinking and self-interest of recent city dwellers, moral self-sufficiency and even some aristocratism of the village and moral vices and bourgeoisness of the big city. At the same time, the village was then of a passing nature: the processes of industrialization could not be stopped, but only slowed down, and therefore the village prose was increasingly penetrated by dislike of technocratic civilization as such.
Uzbek literature, like Russian literature, in the 1970s was an integral part of Soviet literature as an inter-literary community with similar algorithms of the literary process, the attitudes of literary generations and value rows in different republics. But Uzbek literature did not provide a certain model of "village" morality as self-sufficient and aristocratic, as opposed to bourgeoisie and careerism in the cities. The national life of Uzbekistan was different: there were originally
more kishlaks in Uzbekistan than cities, and therefore the rustic forms of existence and worldview remained longer with urban residents. One did not have to go to the village to understand the conflict of rustic and urban rules of life.
In Uzbekistan, village traditions could be generalized as national: the principles of the attitude to land and labor became also the general principles of economic management for the whole country, regardless of whether we face a large city or a village. In the postcolonial optics, what in the old Western optics looks like a simple reverence for elders and the experience of ancestors could be recognized as the basis for the organization of complex social and economic relations within which a person is formed and it is tested to what extent a person can manage the economy bequeathed by ancestors and to what extent the same person can manage its own inner world. Therefore, collectivization as the main problem of Russian village prose is not present in Uzbek literature, as it deprived Russian people of the former forms of economic management and the connection to the traditions, sanctities and religious habits of the ancestors, which makes the heroes of village prose appear as sages or moralists, able to defend their spiritual, but not their material independence.
In the works of such major writers of the second half of the twentieth century as Adil Yakubov, Pirimkul Qodirov, Utkur Xoshimov, Erkin Agzamov, Sharof Bashbekov and others, the moral problematics of this organization of economy on the basis of common traditions and rules began to define both individual aesthetic solutions and the system of characters and images that reveal the content of each hero's personality. The hero does not so much show character in the course of the work's action, as in Russian village prose, as he unexpectedly manifests his inner state at the moment of making decisions, finds himself facing an existential choice and reveals himself from an unexpected side. In school genre theory this could be understood as a dramatization of the prose, but in fact we are facing an organization of internal conflict associated with a specifically local configuration of relations of personal will, ancestral traditions and ways of disposing of property in the household and own spiritual and intellectual positions.
For V. Rasputin and for Uzbek writers in the 1980s, the internal psychological criteria of human morality are defined not by the concepts of "positivity" or "negativity," but by the ability to coincide with the moral idea that belongs to time and history. History in their prose appears not in itself, but psychologically refracted in the human destinies and consciousness of the characters. Hence the predominance in their works of the 1980s of the monological form of narration capable of linking the drama of the present and a presentiment of the future. However, if V. Rasputin insists on the need to restore the sense of the past as making the correct models of national life and national cooperation, and the morality of the hero is determined based on the spiritual and practical experience of centuries, then the Uzbek writers actualize the present and determine the morality of the heroes based on what living traditions of the past right here and now contribute to the formation of personality.
De-ideologization of literature in the 1990s determined a tendency of shift-
ing the personal and moral psychological artistic depiction of reality towards ethical guidelines under the conditions of national independence and detachment. It was during this period that Russian and Uzbek literature underwent a complex process of simultaneous convergence and divergence: a convergence in the search for a certain fictional and stylistically marked model of moral and psychological quests explained by the similar social pattern of culture in the 1990s, and a divergence for the purpose of finding own national path of literary development.
Therefore, the experience of the past in the 1990s, from the point of view of the writers of the two countries under consideration, should not be actualized so much as understood as constructive, as capable of creating a framework for describing the present. However, if for Rasputin this meant that the Russian national order of pre-revolutionary time with its sobornost' can give examples of co-operation in our day, for Uzbek writers this order was part of the present, somewhat problematic, but already built into forms of social cooperation at all levels, where the main prob If we pay attention directly to the works of Uzbek literature of the second half of the twentieth century, we should note the obvious influence of V. Rasputin's works.
Yakubov's "Farewell" and Rasputin's "The Last Term"
The small, but succinct story by Adyl Yakubov "Farewell" (1980) was written, according to the author, under the influence of "The Last Term" (1970) by Rasputin (based on a personal conversation between S. Kamilova and the writer Adyl Yakubov in 2004). Like Shukshin and Rasputin, Yakubov combined criticism of the new Soviet bourgeoisie with criticism of the intelligentsia. Scientists in his story are mired in proprietary interests, pseudoscientific research and technocracy. In the story, graduate student Nodir is guided only by a selfish calculation in preparing his dissertation. "Don't you all understand that my life, my future, everything depends on it. This defense is not just for me, but for all of us. I'm not talking about authority, you won't understand that, but there will be several times more money of those damn things" [Тысяча и одна жизнь 1988, 167]. Metaphorically meaningful is the theme of his dissertation: "The Nervous System of the Frog". Nodir unapologetically asserts that "between the nervous system of man and the frog there is a certain similarity" [Тысяча и одна жизнь 1988, 167]. Thus the writer creates a satire on philistinism as frog-being in a swamp, but this satire suddenly takes on the meaning of denouncing lies as a mystical curse, for example, when the hero calls his work a curse: "if I do not defend myself now, this curse (emphasis added) will hang over me for seven more months" [Тысяча и одна жизнь 1988, 171]. At the same time, the bearer of traditional morality is Nadir's elder brother Abdullajan. As in Russian village prose, the main positive moral qualities are modesty, consideration for others, and hard work, which contrasts with the careerism, laziness, and indifference of city dwellers. Only here, unlike in Russian prose, the conflict of the two beginnings unfolds in one generation of one family.
Yakubov follows Rasputin not so much in the portrayal of characters as in the system of oppositions, such as life/death and death/immortality, which define the chronotopes of the characters. V. Rasputin's tale begins with the phrase: "The old woman Anna was lying on an iron bed near the Russian stove and was waiting for death, the time for which seemed to have come: the old woman was about eighty" [Распутин 1985, 130]. Approximately the same beginning of Adyl Yakubov's story: "Over the past week, the old master Kabul became quite ill. He lay on his back in the best room of the house, by the window into the garden, on a wooden bed" [Тысяча и одна жизнь 1988, 165]. Dying on the level of the plot, thanks to the fact that the perspective of catharsis is introduced from the very beginning, brings moral fortitude and immortality closer together. Whereas in Rasputin this position is rooted in Christian notions of the Day of Judgment, Yakubov is based rather on children's maturing and moral independence: the illness and death of the father becomes a real test for the son's personality, which must be capable of withstanding moral judgment. Until the death of the old man Kabul for his son there remains the option of birth in himself the morality lost in the urban bustle in the pursuit of fame and fortune, but he turns out to be indifferent, therefore unresponsive and failed as a person. This dominance of oppositions and personal eschatology determines that the question of the morality of the older generation, the dying heroes, is not raised by both writers: these heroes are accepted as moral authorities by default, to become a point of reference for contemporary social debates that readers of their prose must lead after reading.
Rasputin and Yakubov depict the moral decline of children satirically, but with a mystical emphasis. Thus, in Rasputin, his son Ilya loses even his identity, which the writer depicts in the spirit of medieval and romantic tales of the sale of the soul to the devil, after which the man exists only as his likeness, a shell without a soul: "Next to his bare head his face seemed untruthful, painted, as if his Ilya had sold or lost in cards to another man" [Распутин 1985, 156]. In Yakubov's story, the hero's ugliness is frighteningly grotesque, showing not only selfishness but also diabolical cunning: sweaty face, swollen eyelids, constantly squinting eyes. The unrecognizability of his child or nephew, spoiled by the bustle of the city, is a romantic motif also found in Russian literature ("Tati-ana Borisovna and Her Nephew" from Ivan Turgenev's "Notes of the Hunter"). But with Soviet writers a new motif emerges: the fussiness of children in front of their dying parents.
It turns out that it is not that they have assimilated a non-genuine (from Rasputin and Yakubov's point of view) urban culture, but that this non-genuine urban culture determines two moments of behavior at once. First, the children continue to reproduce in their parents' home those patterns of behavior that they learned in the city; neither the environment at home nor the imminent death of their parents change them, do not force them to remember the past. They act as automatons. Secondly, children do not hide their indifference and disdain for the world of their parents, they are unable even for a while and pretend to express respect for their parents and their feelings. This is why selfishness takes
on a diabolical meaning in both writers, and it is not a clash of characters or habits that is considered, but mystical moral programs. The similar detailing of the narrative serves the single purpose of making the readers' discussion of generational conflict most poignant, not reducible to the models of generational conflict in older literature.
Yakubov resorts to Rasputin's techniques in the stories where the heroes are tested by love. Thus, the story "Missing Star" (1974) depicts the emergence of love as a bright feeling in teenagers. Many parallels can be drawn between this story and Rasputin's "Rudolfio" (1966), where teenage love is also contrasted with the grayness of everyday life as a beautiful fairy tale. In both writers, stories, love is not reducible to adulthood, but is a means of constructing one's own identity and self-awareness. In this way, both writers create not just a concept of personality, but a concept of the construction of personality, which should have helped to move away from the models of identity offered by old socialist realism and opened the way for a further metaphysical justification of the moral tasks of the individual.
Mukhtar's "Roots" as a hidden polemic with V. Rasputin's national project
In the 1970s and 1990s, a number of writers in Uzbek prose also addressed the problem of the "rooted", indigenous man. However, unlike Russian writers, such as V. Rasputin, in the Uzbek tradition this rooted man is depicted not as an exception in a changed world, but as the rule of generational succession: such a man must arise in every generation. Whereas Russian literature proceeded from the premise that industrialization and collectivization irrevocably destroyed tradition, and therefore the village prose sought to organize a broad discussion to reconsider the results of urban modernization, Uzbek literature insisted that there was more than one channel for the preservation of tradition, thanks to which in each new generation there is an entrenchment.
Thus, A. Mukhtar in the story "Roots" (1983) depicts Marat and Muhsina who are in love with each other. Although the psychological habits of the young man and the girl are different, the consideration of other samples of love, parental and friendly, helps them find agreement for a while. The story is structured as a constant grounding of individual love in generic norms, which is openly declared: "Whether city or kishlak, morality is one. Parents, too, sometimes have to hold themselves accountable. Love is a strong feeling, and cheating in love is severely punished. <.> But it is a question of moral purity, conscience. Chastity is the mother of love. Moral impurity must not go unpunished." [Тысяча и одна жизнь 1988, 129].
In Uzbek literature, rooting is opposed to forgetting, which is served in the story under consideration by the image of the mankurt from reinvented by Chin-giz Aitmatov medieval fable of the captive of Rurans, who after tortures forgot all his past. Mukhsina tells Mukhtar about the reason for the separation, his desire to behave differently from his ancestors can lead to forgetting all moral rules
and a complete loss of personality: "You are still the same Marat-aka. I don't know what has changed. I thought for a long time: there are moral origins in our lives, spiritual values inherited from our ancestors. A person who tramples on them cannot be kind and responsive. In that book you saw, a way of punishment is drawn. After that, a person loses his memory, forgets his homeland, his land, his relatives, and doesn't even recognize his mother. Such people are called mankurts... I don't want to become a mankurt" [Тысяча и одна жизнь 1988, 138]. Again, Uzbek literature addresses not just a social but a moral discussion, and speaks not just of the distortion of personality, but of the risk of the complete loss of personal qualities, the transformation of a person into a devilish mask. The break with nature is interpreted in Uzbek literature, unlike in Russian literature, not simply as a break with village life, but as a break with one's own personality and a complete loss of cultural memory.
Kabul's "Hello, Mountains!" as metaphysical reassembling of Rasputin's "Live and Remember"
Rasputin's "Live and Remember" (1974) and Kabul's "Hello, Mountains!" (1979) are similar in many ways, first and foremost, because the center is a female character, Nastyona and Korakoz, respectively. Both stories are pathetic, both tales have wartime in mind and fidelity to the beloved not only to the grave, but also beyond the grave. Although we can speak of the eternal female image of the mourner (Antigone in Sophocles), the tragedy of both tales is reinforced by the fact that war is understood as an evil that can destroy anyone: just as anyone can be hit by a random bullet, so anyone can become a victim of slander, selfishness and indifference.
Korakoz speaks to her deceased father, who acts as a prophet who instructs her to guard the values of the family, above all the ability to speak the truth. The father, while teaching patience and promising that there will be retribution for injustice, warns her of the dangers and the possibility of a tragic outcome for her as well: "Good people are always unarmed, so quickly a bullet finds them, so quickly every bitter word hurts their soul, daughter. Whatever it is, from a bad man remains a bad memory, from a good man a good one. Try to be a decent person." [Узбекские рассказы 1984, 161]. The prophecy comes true, and the heroine of Kabul, driven to despair by bad news from the front and gossip about her, commits suicide in order to remain in history a person of honor who has preserved the dignity of the family. If in Rasputin, Nastyona suffers the dishonor of her husband deserter, trying to preserve the village life and way of life, and only when deprived of his home, commits suicide, Korakoz, the same victim of war and gossip, afraid of losing not a house and living, but his own personality. Nastyona grows tired of the unbearable life, and Korakoz grows tired of the general enmity between people.
Kabul concludes the story with an ethical generalization that speaks of the unity of the generations as a reality not only of the past and present, but also of the future: "Farewell, mountains! When all people on earth love each other,
when wars, sorrow and injustice disappear, wake us from our eternal sleep! And we, with the words 'Hello, mountains!' will be born again, young and happy. We will live another, beautiful life, when enmity between people disappears! <.. .> And maybe indeed, after living this life on earth, in seven or fourteen generations we will be born again, and we will meet and be happy? Who knows" [Узбекские рассказы 1984, 236]. Thus, the Uzbek writer raises the question not of the crisis of the village, but of the crisis of ancestral memory during the war and the inevitability of the restoration of ancestral memory after the establishment of peace.
"White Poplars" by Kenja as a nation-building remake of "Farewell to Matyora" by Rasputin
The story "Farewell to Matyora" (1976) by Rasputin inspired the Uzbek novelist Kamchibek Kenja to create one of his famous works 'White Poplars" (1980). These works are united by the problem of memory and oblivion. Like Rasputin, Kenja considers a situation in which eternal values are sacrificed for momentary and imaginary gain disastrous for the country and the people. The situations characteristic of Soviet society at that time are typologically similar: Rasputin's flooding of villages and Kenja's felling of "unpromising" trees.
Rasputin's reasoning about the meaning of human existence connects to the meditations of the old woman Daria: "And who knows the truth about man, why he lives? For the sake of life itself, for the sake of children, so that children leave children, and children's children leave children, or for the sake of something else? Will this movement be eternal? And if it's for the children, for the movement, for this incessant jerking, then why come to these graves? <.> What should a man feel, for the sake of whom many generations have lived? He feels nothing. He understands nothing. And he behaves as if he was the first who started life, and by him it will end forever" [Распутин 1985, 361]. For the conscientious and conservative Daria, the value of the past is undeniable: she refuses to move out of her native village, at least until the graves would be moved. She wants to take her "graves. native" to a new place, and wants to save from blasphemous destruction not only the graves, but also the very conscience. For her ancestral memory is sacred. Rasputin uses one of the traditional symbols of life, a tree. The old larch, the "royal larch", is a symbol of the power of nature. Neither fire, nor axe, nor a modern chainsaw could cope with it.
The image of the tree becomes a point of reference for Kenja as well. The order to cut down the white poplars, which contained all the beauty of the Long Street of the collective farm, created a situation of moral choice not only for Mamasali, the direct executor, but also for all the residents, who were sadly but silently present at this tragedy of the death of the natural element in the story. Through their non-interference, the people made a moral choice toward immortality. This process of ethical destruction of the most valuable thing in man, moral consciousness, is metaphorically embodied in the dream: "In the morning Mamasali had a dream. Alone he was sawing a huge poplar. The poplar is tilt-
ing and about to fall on him. Mamasali tries to run away, but the poplar reaches after him. Mamasali reaches the ditch and stops. The poplar that has caught up with him suddenly turns into a handsome old man. The old man smiles sadly and shakes his head" [Тысяча и одна жизнь 1988, 361]. Note the difference: the tree in Rasputin is a metaphor for the village, which suffered from collectivization and industrialization, but not crushed to the end, as long as there is a moral memory of it. In Kenja, trees belong to the village, not to nature, so their preservation maintains the memory of the ancestors, while their destruction first offends the ancestors. Thus, while Rasputin warns of the pettiness of people who ruin the village, Kenja shows how the destruction of the poplars has undermined the memory of the Uzbek people, and it takes a writer's effort and a metaphorical mode of expression to restore that memory. Rasputin calls for social discussion, while Kenja calls for the restoration of the metaphysical mission of literature.
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In the 1970s and 1990s, Russian and Uzbek writers lived in the same historical context, and this explains the reason for the similarity of worldviews and aesthetics. Both were repelled by the system of characters and problems of socialist realism, cultivating psychological prose and wishing to influence a broad social discussion about the dangers and costs of modernization and the actualization of traditions and their moral potential.
V. Rasputin's characters are often villagers and the place of action is the countryside. Such prose in the 1960s and 1970s was a kind of starting point for broad generalizations about the path of civilization in general, about the relationship between mankind and nature in general. Uzbek writers, comprehending the existing reality, also contrast the village and the city, and their characters, having gone through many spiritual and moral trials, discover the meaning of their existence in harmony with their kin. Whereas Rasputin's moral conclusions are led to by the logic of reflection, the Uzbek writers draw their conclusions from the logic of the plot, in which both the town and the village are united by the metaphysical reality of the clan. Rasputin's heroes are close to nature, and the village way of life helps them to defend their moral independence. The heroes of Uzbek prose rather talk to themselves and to others, they are moved not by the way of life, but by the precepts of the kin; the moral ideal turns out to be embodied on the level of plot rather than character, and therefore the discussion can be not so much about restoring the moral ideal by limiting modernization, as in Russian village prose, but about endowing literature with a prophetic function of an inevitable return to the ancestral values.
REFERENCES (RUSSIAN)
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REFERENCES (Articles from Scientific Journals)
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3. Stoletova A. S. Transformatsiya sotsialisticheskogo mirovozzreniya pisateley-derevenshchikov i ideologicheskaya osnova ostrosotsial'nykh proizvedeniy o krest'yanskom uklade zhizni Russkogo Severa [Transformation of the Socialist World-view of Village Writers and the Ideological Basis of Acute Social Works about the Peasant Way of Life in the Russian North]. VestnikKostromskogogosudarstvennogo univer-siteta, 2019, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 135-139. (In Russian).
(Monographs)
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(Thesis and Thesis Abstracts)
7. Stepanova V. A. Dualizm kak formula mirovozzreniya V. Rasputina: khudozhest-vennaya sistema vyrazheniya [Dualism as a formula for the worldview of V. Rasputin: an Artistic System of Expression]. PhD Thesis. Saint-Petersburg, 2016. 249 p. (In Russian).
Alexander V. Markov, Russian State University for the Humanities.
Doctor of Philology, Professor at the Department of Cinema and Contemporary Art. Research interests: theory of literature and art.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
Saodat Kamilova, National University of Uzbekistan.
Doctor of Philology, professor. Research interests: modern Russian literature, modern Uzbek literature.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7542-3970
Марков Александр Викторович, Российский государственный гуманитарный университет.
Доктор филологических наук, профессор кафедры кино и современного искусства. Научные интересы: теория литературы и искусства.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
Камилова Саодат Эргашевна, Национальный университет Узбекистана имени Мирзо Улугбека.
Доктор филологических наук, профессор. Научные интересы: современная русская литература, современная узбекская литература.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7542-3970
