(Neo)mythologization of the image of the house-hotel in Lena Eltang’s novel “Stone Maples”
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2024-6-133-142
The article contains the results of the study of the semantics of the central spatial image of the house-hotel in Lena Eltang’s novel “Stone Maples” and the manifestation of the poetics of neomodernism in the methods of mythologization of the image of the house. The house-hotel “Stone Maples” is not only the space of the plot action, but also a “character” of the diaries/book of the central heroine, an image-myth in her consciousness. “Maples” are the place of death of Sasha’s parents, they connect the semantics of life and death not as in an idyll (natural change of generations), but in accordance with archaic ideas about death as a stage of the life cycle. This mythological semantics is manifested through different semiotic codes – vegetative and creative: burial in the ground and digging up of the herbal diary is likened to the death and resurrection of grain, birth. In addition, the image of the “Stone Maples” supports a complex of allusions to a fairy tale, is associated with an enchanted kingdom, a place to test the abilities of a potential groom to rescue a bride from trouble, to resurrect her from sleep-death. Finally, the story of the appearance of this home in the Sonli family is important. The house was bought with money bequeathed to Sasha’s mother by a secret selfless lover and received after his death, but it was turned into a hotel, combining the functions of a family estate and an inn. Through the image of a house-hotel, Eltang builds a personal myth about the world and man in it. This myth emphasizes the “absoluteness”, the ideality of the House, but it is an accidental gift and a temporary earthly refuge for man. The house does not guarantee the stability of existence. But it is the awareness of oneself as a “guest”, “innkeeper” that contributes to the emergence and implementation of a creative intention aimed at countering the disintegration of matter, the destruction of connections. Mythologism in the novel is combined with psychologism, archaic semantics in the poetics of the novel’s space is connected with the author’s myth about the ‘house-hotel’.
Keywords: L. Eltang, poetics of space, house, hotel, literature of Russian diaspora, neo-mythologism, modernism, neo-modernism
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Issue: 6, 2024
Series of issue: Issue 6
Rubric: RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND LITERATURE OF THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
Pages: 133 — 142
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