ЗЕМЛІ НИЖНЬОГО ПОДУНАВ’Я ЯК МАРГІНАЛЬНИЙ ПРОСТІР В ПОСТМОДЕРНІСТСЬКОМУ РОМАНІ КРІСТОФА РАНСМАЙРА «ОСТАННІЙ СВІТ»
THE LOWER DANUBE AREA AS A MARGINAL SPACE IN THE POSTMODERN NOVEL BY CHRISTOPH RANSMAYR «THE LAST WORLD»

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to study the postmodern interpretation of the topos of the Lower Danube region as a marginal space in the context of the mythopoetic history of the disgraced Roman poet Ovid's stay in these lands during the years 9-17 AD. The objectives of the research include a description of the landscape of the Lower Danube Lowland at the beginning of the modern era and the people who inhabited it in terms of Ovid's perception of events and in the phantasmagoric space of the postmodern novel. The object of the study is Christoph Ransmayr's novel The Last World (1988) and Ovid's collection Tristia, written during his exile in Tomis. The author analyzes how the world-famous story of the exile of the remarkable poet Ovid to the lands of the Lower Danube, which he characterized as «the Roman frontier on the left bank of the Pontus» and «the icy border of the outer circle of the earth», has changed the postmodern worldview. Christoph Ransmayr's novel draws attention to this specific geographical region and opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between space, history, and culture in postmodern literature. The aesthetics of postmodernism is based on the strategy of deconstructing traditional meanings, playing with texts, and intertextuality. Ransmayr skillfully integrates these elements, using the lands of the Lower Danube Lowlands as a stage for the deployment of complex narrative structures and the interweaving of different historical and cultural layers. This allows the reader to see new aspects of the interaction between the real and fictional worlds. The fates of the three historical prototypes of the characters in The Last World (Ovid, Pythagoras and Cotta) have one thing in common: they all fell victim to people with unlimited power. Thus, the confrontation of the creative personality with despotism is also understood as a kind of «eternal» state of humanity. The images of the revived characters of Metamorphosis complement the pictures of degradation and desolation as an illustration of the idea of the moral decline of civilization. The author paid special attention to the concept of «memory of the iron city» presented in the novel. The writer reanimates the most disgusting human deeds from mythological stories geographically close to ancient Tomis. The idea of the dynamic development of the world, embodied in the PythagoreanOvid formula «nothing retains its unchanged form», is dichotomously transformed into the concept of the paradigmatic nature of history, the idea of eternal return and reappearance. The attempt to mythologize the society leads to the identification of binary mythological constants that determine the development of the world: love and betrayal, revenge and forgiveness, spiritual impoverishment and the impulse of creative thought, the triumph of despotic regimes and the opposition of the creative personality to them.

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