About the author:
Natalia V. Prashcheruk, DSc in Philology, Professor, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, 51 Lenin Ave., 620000 Ekaterinburg, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4407-5293
E-mail:
Abstract:
The work provides an analysis of the “estate topos”, unveiled through the main plot related to a history of an old Russian family in the novel “Sighs of the chained. Russian saga” (2017) by a contemporary writer Ekaterina Dombrovskaya. The image of the Orekhovo estate is built in the context of the author’s Christian worldview and in relation to the understanding of the genus as a phenomenon in its spiritual and ontological foundations, as well as with the ideas of “signal heredity” by M.E. Lobashev and “feeding landscape” by L.N. Gumilev, opposite to the “barrack landscape”. Writer’s interpretation of events and characters’ fates is based on evangelical and patristical tradition as well as on biblical and general cultural symbols. The key symbols of the novel are “deep waters” that feed life of a family and its ancestral memory and oppose the “coffin of oblivion”. Narration is characterized by a broad range of discourses, profusion of means of expression and different literary styles all of which add to an artistic completeness of the “estate topos”. The joy of embracing the nativeness is combimed with a dramatic experience of realizing that this nativeness is lost and can not be restored. Preserving the past is only possible by keeping the memory of it.