Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Jun 2020)
Event and Chance in Pavel Bazhov’s Tales
Abstract
This article aims at revealing the interrelation between event and chance in the plots of tales by Pavel Petrovich Bazhov, a famous Ural writer. Yuri Lotman defined an event in a text as “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field”, which constitutes an irreversible change in the baseline situation. Chance is distinguished from an event by its abruptness; it is an intrusion of the unexpected into our life, a disturbance of the daily routine and logic, certain excess. However, even A. S. Pushkin noted that chance is sometimes a “tool of Providence”. In Bazhov’s tales, one can find both chance and event which condition the genre setup of the tales which in their turn may correspond to myth texts or those defined by Lotman as peripheral, i.e. novelistic. In Bazhov’s prose, chance usually leads to an event whose starting point, as well as centre, is an encounter; an encounter brings about an event. In tales about craftsmen, such an event is manifested by an encounter of a man with the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. These tales should be classified as myth texts: in them, the basic conflicts of the mythical world unfold and the type of relations between a mysterious force and man is formed. In the other tales, encounters between the persona and the mysterious force are more accidental in nature, and the tales themselves tilt towards one of the two genre-narrative models: either a novelette or a purely epic, even historical, narrative (short story, novella). Novelette tales are Tayutka’s Mirror, The Fire-Fairy, The Blue Snake, Sinyushka’s Well, and Silver Hoof, where personas encounter magical characters of a lesser rank than the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. Epic-like tales are The Cat’s Ears, The Grass Hideaway, Dikes of Gold, Yermak’s Swans, Beloved Name. Thus, throughout the whole collection of his tales, Bazhov built a peculiar compromise between myth, history, and eternity inhabited by the Mistress and other fairytale creatures, and the brief span of human life, between fiction (and belief in it) and mundanity.
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