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This article analyses two stories by women writers (“The Heads of Cerberus” by Francis Stevens (1952) and “The Breakthrough” by Daphne du Maurier (1964)), which could both be considered as belonging to the genre of science fiction. These stories do not follow the ‘canonical’ or more popular type of underworld narrative, especially the idea of the “katabasis” or descent to the underworld and the encounter with the dead, a motif which has often been present in Western culture since classical antiquity and has generated numerous narratives. Rather, they evoke the classical myth of the underworld through the use of certain names (such as Charon and Cerberus) as well as exploring other concepts which coincide with ancient Greek accounts of the topography and inhabitants of the world of the dead, the realm ruled over by Hades.
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"Silence", a characteristic theme in Russian literature, also plays a significant role in contemporary Russian fiction. Yevgeny Vodolazkin’s Laurus, Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s "The Kukotsky Enigma" and Guzel Yakhina’s "Deti moi" [‘My Children’] share several features in their representation of the phenomenon of silence, despite the manifold differences in the plots, the periods in which they are set and in the characters. The first part of the paper explores the components of the three works that establish connections between silence and the conflict, the chronotope and the issue of communication. In each case the plot focuses on the story of a deep but doomed love. It is the protagonist that is responsible for the love’s tragic end and will later try to redeem his or her sin and thereby preserve love in themselves. In all the three works, the reason for the silence of the protagonist – Arseniy, a mediaeval healer, Yelena Kukotskaya, the wife of a gynaecologist from Moscow, and the teacher Bach, a Volga German – is the violence they have had to endure. The spatial attribute of silence is a place on the periphery, which assumes a certain symbolic meaning. In each of the plots, water becomes a very significant spatial element, and it assumes a distinctive mythopoetic function. All three protagonists partake in some mystical experience in which linear time, which plays a dominant role in the depiction of their progression through life, is eliminated. The silent characters also stand out from their environment because of their special connection with language and culture. They replace speech with gestures and writing, and their connection with culture becomes a starting point for certain parallels with the literary tradition. In the second part of the study the common features of the three plots are examined from the point of view of the anthropology of silence and in the perspective of postmodernism. On the basis of this, the author of the paper concludes that none of the three writers are postmodern in the way they describe silence, in terms of either anthropology or aesthetics. Firstly, the image of the human which they revive is characteristic of the Christian and the Cartesian tradition, and alien to the postmodern. Secondly, contrary to the way the function of a literary author is conceptualised in postmodernism, in all the three novels the writers adopt an omniscient position, that is, they embrace the role and responsibility of a centre of sense-making and language.
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The paper is devoted to the category of time in the novel "The Aviator" (2016) by Yevgeny Vodolazkin, the category being the key to comprehending the conceptual universe of this text. The main aim of the study is to identify the temporal layers in the novel and to indicate the dominant attributes that define each of the described periods. In the paper time is considered as a phenomenon, and attribute (determinant) as its distinctive feature. Such an approach allows the author to identify not two, as in previous scholarly literature, but three layers of time: the period of pre- -revolutionary Russia, the period of the “Bolshevik hell”, and the period of Russia at the end of the second millennium. The interpretation of the nature of time in the novel has also been facilitated by a general consideration of the work’s genre affiliation. Basing on the conviction that the elements imperceptible in the historical process create a real picture of a certain period, thus encouraging the study of the minutiae of life in different times, the author describes various details, as well as classifies them. The representative groups of indicators are distinguished as follows: smells inherent to certain attributes, sounds emitted by attributes, elements of the characters’ everyday life as well as festive time, means of transport, and the arrangement of space. The concept of chronotope, developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, has also been important for the study. The author notices that the change of a historical reference point is accompanied by a new characterisation of the indicators. In the discussed novel it is precisely the attributes that make it possible to separate the temporal layers, and this, indeed, is their main function.
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