Neo-mythological ways of embodying the theme of mentoring in the novels by Mariam Petrosyan “The Gray House” and Victor Kozko “Chronicle of an orphanage garden”

The comparative study of closely related literatures seems to be a relevant direction in modern humanities. This perspective of the study allows us to identify the creative uniqueness of the work, the national basis and methods of literary reception through the disclosure of literary and sociocultural connections, and forms the openness of consciousness to the perception of foreign cultural codes and meanings. The creative individuality of Viktor Kozko was formed in the Belarusian literary process of the last third of the twentieth century, when there was an increase in the existential orientation of prose. Mythopoeticism is characterized by its rootedness in the universal humanistic constants of national specificity. The main stylistic changes occur at the junction of the artistic systems of realism – modernism, realism – postmodernism. The emergence of diffuse phenomena is due to both the individual author’s creative experiment and the general stylistic trends of the era. Modernist intentions in Belarusian literature have a pronounced folklore and mythological basis, which determined the predominance of authentic elements, helped to verbalize unconscious categories, making them the subject of author and reader reflection. Mariam Petrosyan worked on the novel “The Gray House” for almost two decades (1991–2009). The literary process at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, on the one hand, demonstrates the completion of a certain sociocultural stage, on the other, it indicates the beginning of a new historical and cultural cycle. It is no coincidence that the allegorical nature of the novel satisfies the aesthetic and cognitive needs of the time – to create a metonymic image of modern society. Both prose writers actively use various types of secondary artistic conventions. Depending on the dominant type of convention and the dominant artistic technique, the following ways of enriching realistic aesthetics with means of non-classical artistry can be distinguished: actualization of surreal aesthetics; synthesis of realistic and fantastic; appeal to folklore and mythological motifs, mythological ways of understanding the world. The methods of mythological quotation used in the novels by Mariam Petrosyan “The Gray House” and Viktor Kozko’s “Chronicle of an orphanage garden” when embodying the images of teachers and students, topoi of the house and garden, neomythological methods of modeling reality allowed the writers to create a unique spatiotemporal organization of works, explicate national cultural codes.

Russian literature, Belarusian literature, realism, modernism, comparative typological analysis, mythological quotation