Литературная Хайфа Дениса Соболева на перекрестке времен, культур и жанров
Dennis Sobolev’s Literary Haifa on the Crossroads of Times, Cultures and Genres

Summary/Abstract: Dennis Sobolev’s novel Legends of Carmel Mountain: Fourteen Stories about Love and Time consists of 14 stories with autonomous plots with the Haifa’s locus as a unifying factor. Some of them resemble urban or mountain folklore, e.g. about the dragon who inhabits Carmel Mountain or a ghost of the white monk in its tunnels. However, the author invented them and ignored actual local folklore. Haifa is at the same time very recognizable and fantastic. The plots contain numerous intercultural references to various male and female golems/ dolls, transformations of humans into beasts as well as to necrophilia. Among them are medieval Jewish sources e.g. Solomon ibn Gabirol, Hebrew writer Shmuel Yossef Agnon, the Arabian Nights, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Russian writer Andrei Bely etc., all of them are both sophisticated and partially misleading. The symbolical meanings of numbers (14 stories) are in fact connected to seven doubles from the Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzirah) meaning both the best and the worst things in the world. The stories are connected not by the characters but rather by the symbolic meaning.

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