Vestnik Permskogo universiteta: Rossijskaâ i zarubežnaâ filologiâ (Jul 2018)
THE MOTIF OF SEEKING A WOMAN IN V. MAKANIN’S NOVEL "UNDERGROUND, OR HERO OF OUR TIME"
Abstract
In V. Makanin’s novel Underground, or Hero of Our Time (1998), the motif of seeking a woman determines the repetition of situations with encounters and stories of the central character’s relationship with women, as well as a system of plotlines and characters connected with seeking women. Love stories of the novel are based on the principle of repetition, twoness. There are three phases in the development of the central character’s love story. The first phase portrays the character in everyday life, where the search for weak, defenseless women means following the “call of being” (M. Heidegger), and is implemented in the story of salvation of women, where “care” about the other is a means used by characters to justify their own existence. In the second phase, crime (two murders) gives rise to the need for a woman having a natural ability for compassion, empathy (the story of salvation of men by women). In the final phase of the novel, the main character is absorbed with the everyday existence, physicality, and physiological needs of men in women are shown as prevailing. Based on ethical requirements of classic Russian literature, the protagonist of the novel brings his own changes: not love, but regret, care about the Other, not sacrificing, because sacrifice and help will not save. In contrast to the traditional interpretation of love as manifestation / non-manifestation of a person’s individuality or animality, in the novel V. Makanin puts emphasis on the main character’s (Petrvovich) desire to build the “story” of the relationship as an experiment on reality and as a way of interpreting it. Thus, the article reveals the transformation of the semantics of the archaic motif of seeking women by a man, which shows changes in the concept of love in the consciousness of the modern hero. The anthropological interpretation of encounters with women reveals the dependence of men on physicality / vitality of life, however, the reduction of the spiritual basis of love is compensated in the novel with the existential interpretation of a person’s wandering in search for the Other, as a response to the “call of being” needs to be heard.
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