Ретротопия как форма побега и конформизма (Оправдание острова и Чагин Евгения Водолазкина)
Retrotopia as a form of escape and conformity: (Justification of the Island and Chagin by Evgeny Vodolazkin)

Summary/Abstract: The article considers several works by Evgeny Vodolazkin of recent years, in which there is a convergence of medieval techniques and modern literary trends. All of them are united by a global setting for retrotopia, in the understanding of Sigmund Bauman, namely: an escape into the past, a search for the limit of originality, a sense of unity, and myth-making. Based on the article Literature: The Future Is in the Past (2019) and the novel Justification of the Island (2020), the study of the topic of anachronisms as a form of aberration of consciousness and retrospective thinking, characteristic of the Middle Ages, is carried out. The novel Chagin (2022) explores the myth-making attitudes associated with the method of retrospection, in which memory is distorted, consciousness is restructured, and mistakes and moral fall are justified. Such concepts and categories as reality, history, memory, responsibility, deed, and repentance are completely withdrawn from circulation. As a conclusion, one can postulate a paradoxical annulment of the theme of memory, declared at the beginning of Chagin’s novel, and its replacement with the theme of oblivion and memory distorted in retrospection, symbolically represented by the rivers Lethe and Eunoia.

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