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- Olofsson, Kerstin, 1940-
(author)
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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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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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