THE CONCEPT OF TIME IN L. ULITSKAYA’S NOVELS “DANIEL STEIN, TRANSLATOR” AND “THE GREEN TENT”

Abstract

The article deals with a problem of realizing the category of time in the prose of L. Ulitskaya on the example of novels “Daniel Stein, Translator” and “The Green Tent”. In the first of them, the writer refers to the depiction of historical events (wars, conflicts) that determine the lives of the heroes and at the same time serve as a background for them. The fates of the heroes are traced – in a compressed or expanded form – throughout their lives, and the writer is primarily interested in what exactly influenced the formation of the character of a particular hero. The chaotic arrangement of chapters in the novel not only reflects postmodern traditions, but also expresses the author’s concept of the equivalence of any life events – chapters on religious philosophy, love experiences or everyday trifles follow one another, they are equivalent in compositional and semantic terms, since in life these phenomena are inseparable. In the novel “The Green Tent”, the writer is interested in the conditions for the formation of a person’s character, the period of childhood, formation, and also the question of how much a person can influence the course of history. Ulitskaya comes to the conclusion that history is not subject to the will of man, that the connection between generations is lost, the characters forget their past – and the best way to convey this disunity of generations and times is the discontinuity, non-linearity of the narrative.