Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices (Mar 2024)

The Artistic Universe of Chingiz Aytmatov: From Bilinguality to Transculture

  • Alfiya I. Smirnova

DOI
https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-897X-2024-21-1-122-133
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 21, no. 1
pp. 122 – 133

Abstract

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The study analyzes the prose of Ch.T. Aitmatov, created in Russian, starting with the stories “Farewell, Gyulsary!”, “The White Steamer”, “The Piebald Dog Running by the Edge of the Sea” and ending with his “epic” novel, reveals the artistic evolution of the writer: from bilingualism to transculture. The ethno-ontological analysis of the stories and novels “And the Day Lasts Longer than a Century”, “The Scaffold”, “Cassandra’s Brand”, “When the Mountains Fall (Eternal Bride)” made it possible to identify the dynamics of the author’s creative development, to characterize this process as the “expanding artistic Universe” of the author: from ethnic picture of the world to the creation of a mythopoetic model of existence in stories, the transition to the genre of the novel as a “universal concept of Being and man” and the beginning of a new creative stage, marked by the cosmism of the writer’s thinking and an appeal to fantasy, interest in different national cultures, the increasing tragedy of the worldview, “synthetism” genre form, new coordinates in constructing a world model (East - West, Earth - Space, archaic time - modernity), the formation of a transcultural polylogue space (inclusion of Biblical and world literary intertext).

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