The Chronotope of Fairy Tale in Guzel Yakhina’s Novel “My Children”

The article examines the chronotope of fairy tale as a basic plot component in the structure of the novel “My Children” by the contemporary Russian writer Guzel Yakhina. The article investigates the ways of archetypical space functioning within the system of mythological time, and analyzes the principal space and time coordinates of the lives of main characters and their interaction. There is shown that Yakhina’s appeal to the genre elements of fairy tale allows her to underscore the universal and all-encompassing nature of the historical processes that shaped the tragic fate of the Volga Germans in Soviet Russia. In the novel “My Children”, the plots and images of German folklore serve as a basic model for organizing different types of space arising from the stable archaic communicative mo­dels and cultural archetypes of folk tradition. The no­vel presents such elements of the space and time continuum of fairy tales as the existence of borders (both open and closed) and the character’s travels within different worlds; the transformative capacity of space and time (extension and compression, appearance and disappearance, plasticity and rigidity, dynamic and static properties, etc.); the link between the “lower” and the “upper” worlds or the “space of giants” and the “space of dwarves”; and the mutual influence of space and time characteristics. The article identifies the semiotic and semantic properties of the underground, underwater, aquatic, terrestrial and aerial spaces presented in the novel. The everyday and socio-historical space and time continua in the novel are a mirror reflection of the space and time characteristics of fairy tale, while archetypes are incarnated in the domain of social interaction. Yakhina’s novel “My Children” presents such chronoto­pic features as relativism, invariance, and symmetry. The use of the archetypical structure of fairy tale allowed the writer to make a literary analysis of complex socio-cultural and socio-psychological processes.

Guzel Yakhina, chronotope, fairy tale, folklore, archetype, “My Children” novel

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