Discord. Essays on folk aesthetics in an era of disappearing time. On the novel The Best Is Still to Come [Vsyo vperedi] by V. Belov

The article discusses V. Belov’s novel The Best Is Still to Come [Vsyo vperedi]. Published in 1986, the novel became a target of numerous scathing reviews, remaining one of the writer’s most controversial books to this day. The article examines the polemic between D. Urnov and A. Malgin published in Voprosy Literatury in 1987. The author goes on to propose the novel’s modern interpretation based on such concepts as I. Shaytanov’s ‘one-time form’ and Z. Bauman’s ‘retrotopia.’ He finds that The Best Is Still to Come is unique from the viewpoint of its genre, and so are Belov’s other works Harmony. Essays on folk aesthetics [Lad. Ocherki narodnoy estetiki] and The Daily Life of Russian North [Povsednevnaya zhizn russkogo Severa]. Analysed are the novel’s chronotope, shifts and disruptions of artistic time, and confusion in the artistic space. The key image of this urban novel by Belov, discord (raz-lad ) is contrasted with the image of harmony, con-cord (lad ) that permeates his writings about the traditional rural lifestyle.

URBANI PEJZAŽ U PAVESEOVOM ROMANU "MEĐU USAMLJENIM ŽENAMA" / URBAN LANDSCAPE IN PAVESE’S NOVEL "AMONG LONELY WOMEN"

The description and symbolism of the city have a multiple and deep role in Pavese’s novels: the urban landscape is especially depicted through the intimate experience of the protagonists’ returning to their hometown after years spent elsewhere, and perceiving its certain aspects in an authentic way. In this paper, we will strive to recognize various ways of showing us the ambience of Turin in the novel Among Lonely Women, according to the theoretical view of Hana Wirth-Nesher and her study City Codes, Reading the Urban Novel.

PECULIARITIES OF THE CHRONOTOPE THROUGH THE PRISM OF IDENTITY PROBLEM OF THE URBAN NOVEL CHARACTER

The article analyses the chronotope of the novel by Orhan Pamuk Silent House through the prism of identity problem. The purpose of the article is to establish a connection of this problem to the peculiarities of the interpretation of the chronotope (which is a result of analysis of the opposites capital-country and East-West. The urban issue of the Silent House grounds on the eschatological paradigm and the cyclic concept of the world, the concept of eternal return; this attests a postmodernist understanding of the categories of time and space. Hence, the composition of the novel is a peculiar spatial and temporal mosaic and narrative polyphony. In the temporal space of the Silent House the spatial (home and provincial town) and temporal (past and present) images, motive of travel (real and metaphysical in the form of memories), of the travelers acquire the semantics of existential metamorphosis that lead to moral and spiritual initiation. And the closed space of the novel — the house of Mrs. Fatma and the provincial Turkish town — appears as a special topos-gerontope, the main principle of which is a freezing of the time. In this way Pamuk realizes typical for his works problems of relations between the West and the East and self-identification.