Genre of a non-historical novel

Abstract

Genre of a non-historical novel. Russian author Yevgeny Vodolazkin is professionally engaged in literary-historical research of medieval Russian literature and culture. This is an exceptional historical and spiritual period known as the Old Russian. The Middle Ages of Russia, in its social features, accentuate the time corresponding to the form of the state and the system of political, economic, and military power and the development of the human consciousness of the population. Old Russia is a closed country and lagging behind with its education, maturity, legal consciousness beyond the western parts of the continent, it has an undeveloped social and cultural structure in the prevailing rural way of life. It focuses on cognition, the moral and traditional norm of life, which is determined and controlled by contemporary Christian clergy. Laurus offers a story of human life, from the early age of an orphan Arsenija, a young man of a healer without a family named Ustin, to the promise of the monk Ambrose, to the death of the same man, the age of the saint named Laurus. In transforming the names of the same figure, the author illustrates the uniqueness of the Middle Ages, which in good circumstances provided the transformations and changes of all inanimate and alive so that everything and everyone would disappear into time and memory of the offspring.

Keywords

• genre
• novel
• literary time
• literary space
• narrator
• character