Title of the article:

BUDDHIST AND ANCIENT MYTHOLOGEMS IN THE WORKS OF V. PELEVIN AS A REFLECTION OF THE MODERN PICTURE OF THE WORLD

Author(s):

Larisa G. Khoreva

Information about the author/authors

Larisa G. Khoreva — PhD in Philology, The Russian State University for the Humanities, Miusskaya Sq. 6, 125993 Moscow, Russia. E-mail: novella2000@mail.ru

Section

Philological sciences

Year

2019

Volume

Vol. 54

Pages

pp. 257–264

Received

September 18, 2018

Date of publication

December 28, 2019

Index UDK

821.161.1

Index BBK

83.3(2Рос=Рус)7

Abstract

The turn of the 21th century has been marked by social cataclysms and disintegration of the existing social relations. The humanistic ideas of classical literature advocating the absolute value of personality came into collision with the processes of devaluation of the individual “me”. Against this background contemporary Russian literature reevaluates the principle of anthropocentrism. The author suggests examining Buddhist and ancient mythologems in Pelevin's prose, the symbiosis of which is symbolic, as it manifests the Eastern and Western mentality of the country. The unique combination of reflection of the surrounding reality with the system of archetypal images led to creation of the concept of individual myths, which puts V. Pelevin in line with such postmodernists as V. Aksenov, V. Sorokin, Y. Mamleyev. Mythologems came to be the basis of the latest postmodern literature, as they appealed to the dogmas of traditional society and contributed to the development of new behavioral strategies and protection against the possible dangers of the outside world. The author concludes that the prose of V. Pelevin dealing with archaic mythologies, which become subspecies of intertextuality, offering the reader a new structural and logical network as well as new associative characteristics.

Keywords

mytheme, Pelevin, contemporary Russian literature, world picture, Buddhism, antiquity, postmodernism.

References

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