| Keywords: | existence, transtemporality, trauma, prose, psychologism, Ildar Abuzyarov
|
| Abstracts: | This article examines transtemporal existence through the novel “The Ship of Theseus: A Black and White Novel” (2023) by contemporary Russian writer Ildar Abuzyarov. The relevance and novelty of this work stem from both highlighting the novel’s distinctive features through an existential lens of analysis and integrating it into a research context. Existentialism, on the one hand, influences the macropoetics of the work, contributing to the complexity of its compositional structure, while, on the other hand, it is expressed at the micropoetic level (complex motifs of emptiness, loneliness, spiritual loss, melancholy, and duality; the chromatic poles of black and white; the dichotomies of truth and falsehood, vertical and horizontal). The principle of miniature (the small reflects the larger/the entire world) facilitates the expression of a subjective, mortal worldview. A recursive narrative strategy and confessional reflection complicate the novel’s architecture. The novel’s psychologism is also manifested in the distinctive sense of time (transtemporality), the depiction of the characters’ spiritual lives (the motif of fear, the “dead mother” complex, and mental health difficulties), and its permeation with a mortal existence, in which the characters experience a pull toward Thanatos either internally (specific psychological complexes, reflections on death, the dying process, and suicide) or externally (suicide attempts). It is concluded that existentialism, manifested at various levels of the work’s organization, underscores the psychological tone and also becomes one of the novel’s significant artistic constants.
|
| The contact details of authors: | Syryseva, Diana Yuryevna – Candidate of Philology, Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Literatures of the Peoples of Russia and the CIS, A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7956-4738, syryseva97@mail.ru
|
