Temporal and Spatial Narrative Labyrinth: A Bakhtinian Chronotopic Exploration of the Non-fiction - Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (original) (raw)
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Svetlana Aleksievich’s changing narrative of the Soviet–Afghan War in Zinky Boys
Canadian Slavonic Papers
The goal of this article is to trace the developing narrative of the Soviet-Afghan War in Svetlana Aleksievich's Tsinkovye mal'chiki (Zinky Boys) by contrasting the author's initial representation of the truth about Afghanistan in the 1990 full-text edition with the most recent representation found in the 2016 edition of the book. Publicly, Aleksievich has downplayed these textual alterations with the explanation that her interviewees are "living documents," and that therefore she occasionally makes changes that reflect the interviewees' evolving perspectives of the war. This may be true to a certain extent, but the present article identifies trends that suggest a more focused ideological intent or motivation behind the changes. Aleksievich's evolving representation of truth is considered in three interrelated concerns: (1) truth as it relates to the genre of historical accounts; (2) truth as it relates to individual memory processing; and (3) truth as it relates to the document. Cet article vise à tracer le récit en développement de la guerre soviéto-afghane dans le livre Tsinkovye mal'chiki (Cercueils de zinc ; Zinky Boys en anglais) de Svetlana Aleksievitch. Pour ce faire, l'article met en contraste la représentation initiale de la vérité sur l'Afghanistan dans la version intégrale de 1990, avec la représentation la plus récente dans l'édition de 2016. Aleksievitch a publiquement minimisé l'importance de ces modifications textuelles, expliquant que ses interviewés sont des « documents vivants », donc parfois elle introduit des modifications qui expriment leurs perspectives changeantes de la guerre. Cela peut être vrai dans une certaine mesure, pourtant cet article identifie des tendances laissant supposer une intention ou une motivation idéologique plus ciblée à l'origine des modifications. Il examine cette représentation changeante de la vérité sous trois aspects liés : (1) la vérité relative au genre des récits historiques ; (2) la vérité relative à l'intégration des souvenirs de la part de l'individu ; et (3) la vérité relative au document.
Chronotope, Story, and Historical Geography: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Space-Time of Narratives
Antipode, 2011
This article studies space-time as revealed in narrative, especially narrative intended to validate truth claims. Narrative plot is uniquely suited to capturing truths about time, causal complexity, and space. Bakhtin's "chronotope" (space-time), which bridges plot, narrated events, and the real world, is critical to understanding this capacity, whether in fiction, in histories, or in didactic stories, myths, and parables. The chronotope is underutilized in the social sciences, but disputes over indigenous land in Canada exemplify its potential applications. To fully capture these heteroglot ("many-voiced") conflicts, factual verification should not be the only test of a narrative's truthfulness.
PhD Dissertation, 2014
Time and space have always been the central phenomena in the history of human thought. From the ancient times, philosophers have discussed -time‖ and -space‖ from different perspectives -in order to define the reality and essence of existence of time and space, and to explain the functions and meanings of these categories in human life. v The empirical part of the dissertation presents the study of possible influence of the basic philosophical conceptions of time and space, especially the circular sense of time and space which accounts for the coexistence of the past and present, on the following literary works: V. Nabokov's first novel Mary (1926) and his early short stories -A Nursery Tale (1930), The Circle (1936); G. Robakidze's first novel The Snake's Skin (1926); N. Berberova's first novel The Last and the First Ones (1930); I. Bunin's short story Night (1925). In fact, the coexistence of the present and past spatiotemporal levels in the fictional worlds of these literary narratives -the existence of the protagonists' past in their presenttakes place due to the representation of their recollections, thoughts, visions, and philosophical reflections in the stories. Such a metaphysical transference of the protagonists' past to their present spatiotemporal worlds creates forms (examples) of eternal recurrence in the émigré writers' fictions. Moreover, the cyclical time and space in the émigré literature also exists due to the authors' special narrative techniques which form the particular structures of their fictions. Actually, the main reason of such concepts of time and space, in the novelists' literary works, is influenced and determined by the authors' émigré experience.
Zeitschrift für Slawistik
Summary This article studies the poetics of historical reimagination in works by Guzel’ Iakhina and Sergei Lebedev, two contemporary Russian prose writers. The main tendencies in Russian official history politics and memory culture of the last decade form the backdrop for the study. I illustrate these tendencies by a case study analysis of the representation of Stalinist repressions in the history park Rossiia — moia istoriia (Russia — My History). The comparative reading of Iakhina’s and Lebedev’s novels seeks to determine the key poetic features of the two authors’ fictional treatment of the past, also assessing to what degree, and how, these treatments challenge, promote, or negotiate current official history politics and memory culture. The analysis discusses the two authors’ shared concerns but also reveals fundamental differences in their poetics. Whereas Iakhina’s fictional universe has distinct boundaries that confine the story to the time and space where it takes place, Leb...
What was the Artist Struggling Against? On Autobiographical Novels by Andrey Monastyrsky
Journal of the graduate school of letters, 2018
This paper analyses the activities of Andrey Monastyrsky, the leader of the group called “Collective Actions” (CA) which is a part of Moscow conceptualism, namely, a remarkable community of Soviet unofficial art in the 1970s and 1980s. CA is a group that has practiced many performances (they call it “action”) in the field and the forest near Moscow since 1976. The perspective which could be the key to re-examine their long history is the issue of how they sought to appropriate and privatize spacetime. Regarding the privatization, Boris Groys, Russian art-critic and philosopher, pointed out that this term is linked to Moscow conceptualism, though his argument is mainly related to another group from a younger generation of conceptualism. Meanwhile, it is researcher Octavian Esanu who mentions the problem of space and time in CA. However, there exists scope for further research on the theme of time based on the perspective of appropriation. Therefore, this paper tried to shed light on ...
Eastern European Holocaust Studies
In several presentations of his latest documentary “Babi Yar. Context” (2021), the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has emphasized that reading Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar (1966) in his Soviet youth had a tremendous effect on his understanding of the Soviet oblivion regarding the Holocaust in Kyiv. In my paper, I examine the uses and misuses of history in Loznitsa’s documentary film on the tragedy of Babyn Yar. The “context” — archival documentary footage of the preceding explosions of the administrative quarter in Ukraine’s capital organized by the NKVD in September of 1941 and of the welcoming reception by Western Ukrainians of the German army’s occupation of Lviv during the summer of 1941 — provide an important yet inconvenient historical framework for understanding the collective responsibility in mass execution of Kyivan Jews. However, when viewed within Loznitsa’s cinematographic aesthetics, it becomes clear that Kuznetsov’s literary representation of the unspeakable brutal...
In this paper we shall examine the field of “space” with a thematic analysis of some works of Russian writer Svetlana Vladimirovna Vasilenko (Kapustin Yar, 1956), and in particular, concerning the prose: Gorod za kolyucheĭ provolokoĭ (The city behind barbed wire), 2009; Shamara (Shamara), 1991; Durochka (Little Fool), 2000 and Suslik (Gopher), 1997. Concerning the poetry: Nastya (Nastya), Akhtuba (Akhtuba) and Kapustin Yar (Kapustin Yar), 2007. This analysis has the main task to identify and to present the topical recurrent literary signs used by the writer, that collectively conduct to a particular description of a specific Russian geographical space, the Astrakhan’ oblast, that is both homeland of Vasilenko and the primary environment for the protagonists of works. Crucial themes in Russian literature as the Asiatic/European identity, the nationality, the strength of history, the mixing with other peoples and cultures, until the traumatic soviet and post-soviet transformations, and the dramatic sensation of forthcoming catastrophe or apocalypse, are all present in this microcosm, and we shall try to demonstrate that, at the same time, it is a geographic, literary and also an intimate space. Therefore, this research also has the task to find a link between the Vasilenko’s descriptions, to the themes of Russian social history, politics and new feelings.
Revista Amazonia Investiga
The purpose of the article is to study the artistic features of Bohdan Zholdak’s military prose "Ukry" and Yevhen Polozhii’s "Ilovaisk". The methodological basis of the study is complex and is based mainly on the tools of traditional literary studies (comparative-typological, comparative-historical and specific-textual types of literary analysis) using elements of motivational analysis. The article examines military prose as a phenomenon of modern Ukrainian literature; genre diversity of works dedicated to the realities of the anti-terrorist operation and the war in Donbas; the main problems that writers raise. It is determined that Bohdan Zholdak’s film story “Ukry” shows “a noble, active, strong hero who defends freedom, justice and universal ideals.” Zholdak’s style (burlesque-postmodern) depiction of characters is considered with their positive and negative sides, true language and emotions. Yevhen Polozhii’s novel “Ilovaisk” was analyzed, based on the memoir...
Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 2023
This paper addresses the group of works of contemporary Ukrainian literature in which the narrators’ reminiscences about urban areas directly relate to the formation of a national identity. In the Ukrainian fiction of the last two decades, the urban identity of the Soviet period is mainly shown as a specific ideologically caused type of identity, intended to replace or blur the national and the local identities. Marc Augé’s anthropological theory, which is based on the opposition of “places” and “non-places”, underlies the theoretical framework for this study. In the analyzed literary works, non-places as transitional areas, devoid of historicity and identity, are viewed as predominating over places and represented by either communal or private locations. Protagonists’ memories of communal non-places, – such as schools, hospitals, grocery stores, places of commemoration, monuments and administrative buildings, – often emphasize these characters’ feelings of alienation and misery in urban space. Communal non-places are also depicted in fiction as a means for authorities to exert ideological influence on citizens in order to restore the totalitarian regime (as is shown in the novel (Rivne / Rovno (The Wall) by Oleksandr Irvanets). Fiction depicting memories of private places also acquire non-place characteristics, such as the private apartment of the Lvivan Cilycks’ family in Victoria Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom. The transformation of the private area into a non-place demonstrates the danger of ignoring one’s own history, which leads to a loss of urban and national identity and the repetition of historical mistakes made by previous generations.