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- Olofsson, Kerstin, 1940-
(författare)
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Utan minne inget liv : en analys av Valentin Rasputins "Avsked från Matëra" och Čingiz Ajtmatovs "Och dagen varar längre än ett sekel"
- 1988
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The point of departure for this dissertation is the interest in memory that has characterized Soviet cultural life during the 1970s and early 1980s. This theme is developed through an examination of the role of memory in two noted works of the period - Valentin Rasputin's Farewell to Matyora from 1976 and Chingiz Aitmatov's And the Day is Longer Than a Century from 1980. The chapter on Rasputin's work mainly treats the semantics of the novel in relationship to various aspects of myth and folklore. Mythical allusions serve to create a symbolic framework where Matyora, the island and village to be engulfed by water from a power plant's magazine, represents the entire earth. Through them Matyora appears as a world threatened by extinction, a world representing the lives of the nature and the human spirit. Opposed to this world is the "new life", death's shore; as in myth there is a struggle between life and death, good and evil. Memory is here above all shaped by the links to myth and folklore. In the chapter on Aitmatov's work, on the other hand, different connections between various temporal levels are shown to be of particular semantic significance; this is its most important means of shaping memory. One of the temporal levels is constituted by historical legends - they are stressed as being important as parables. But the main attention is not directed towards the remote cultural memory, as in Rasputin, but towards a level of individual memories, the immediate historical and political past - the Stalin era. The last chapter points out that the symbolic level, which exists in both works, is realized in different ways. Symbols in Rasputin are opposed to a number of connections to allegory in Aitmatov.
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| 2. |
- Bodin, Helena
(författare)
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Hjalmar Gullberg och bysantinismen – ”som paradoxer i tid och rum”
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The relation between modern Western literature on the one hand and Byzantine themes and aesthetics on the other has not yet been satisfactorily examined. This dissertation presents a study of the relation between the work of the modern Swedish poet Hjalmar Gullberg (1898-1961) and Byzantinism. Byzantinism is defined here by its Christian element, as a Hellenistic-Christian and Hellenistic-Oriental synthesis with a strong emphasis on the aesthetic aspect of the Orthodox Church, and is understood as the lowest common denominator of the former Byzantine and modern Orthodox cultures. To this aim, the Byzantine semiotic theory of the Orthodox icon is applied to Byzantine liturgy, mosaics and hymns, as well as to Gullberg's modern poems.Gullberg's contact with Byzantinism is shown to be extensive and complex: it includes travels to Greece, Istanbul and Sicily in 1932 and in the 1950's, during which he celebrated Orthodox Easter and visited Byzantine Churches; his 1941 translation of a Byzantine kontakion on the birth of Christ by Romanos Melodos (6th century), based on a Danish translation by the scholar Carsten Høeg; readings in Pseudo-Dionsysios the Areopagite; and, in the late 1940's and 1950's, translations of the modern Greek poets Sikelianos, Seferis and Cavafy, for whom Byzantinism was already an important issue. Thus, instead of the supposed gap between ancient and Christian themes in Gullberg's work, a Byzantine continuity is shown, which in turn affects the traditional interpretation of Gullberg's poetry.In a concluding comparison of the poetics, aesthetics and theology of Romanos and Gullberg, three questions are considered: the concept of time as a paradox of eternity and the present, the representation of Mary as human mother and as Mother of God, and a special kind of literary imagery, expressing the relation between the Divine/Eternal and the human/material, which is discussed here from a semiotic point of view, in connection with the later Byzantine theology of icons. It is shown that while these questions in Romanos' Byzantine hymn have a profound liturgical and theological meaning, in Gullberg's poetry they function as a means of addressing the problem of representation and the mission of the poet as such.
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