Inversion of the motifs of puppetry and harlequinade in the English- And Russian-language prose of modernism (based on the works by Virginia Woolf, Yury Olesha, Konstantin Vaginov, Vladimir Nabokov)
Инверсия мотивов кукольности и шутовства в английской и русскоязычной прозе модернизма (на материале произведений В. Вулф, Ю. Олеши, К. Вагинова, В. Набокова)
Spivak-Lavrov I.
December 2023Tomsk State University
Imagologiya i Komparativistika
2023#2023Issue 2091 - 106 pp.
The article analyzes the works of English and Russian modernism of the first third of the 20th century in terms of comparative literary criticism. The author determines the general philosophical and ideological context of the work by Virginia Woolf, Yury Olesha, Konstantin Vaginov, and Vladimir Nabokov, which reveal the features of expressionism, one of the main trends of modernism. The motifs of puppetry, the images of the puppeteer and the jester-trickster are the conjugation point for understanding and interpreting the texts. The article explores the general techniques and principles for creating symbolic, grotesque and absurd images, as well as the differences and features of the writers individual styles and poetics. In their individual styles, Woolf, Olesha, Vaginov, and Nabokov are closer to expressionism, which allows comparing the work of the English writer Woolf and Russian-speaking writers, united by a temporary context (the first third of the 20th century), as well as by common themes, motifs, techniques, and creative tools. Tragic grotesque, caricature of images, metaphorization, symbolism, and carnival principle become markers of expressionism. Impressionism is characterized by a focus on landscape images, while expressionism focuses on the personality, their tragedy and loneliness. These meanings can be illustrated with the iconic expressionism painting - Edvard Munchs The Scream. Subjective idealism, as well as “extreme forms of subjectivism, almost solipsism”, becomes the main philosophical worldview in the works by Woolf, Olesha, Vaginov, and Nabokov. Binary oppositions “human - thing” and “human - puppet” are realized in the literature of modernism through textual metaphorization. Metaphor, in its broad sense, is a technique that allows transforming objective reality to bring it out of the external world into the writers inner consciousness. The motifs of human - puppet, human - things, human - machine in world literature have a socio-historical basis. It is in the early 20th century that Ortega-y-Gassets concept of the “dehumanization” of art and society began to manifest itself most clearly. A person is reduced to the status of a puppet, becomes an appendage of soulless mechanisms, conveyors, automata. According to Ortega-y-Gasset, a crisis of bourgeois democracy, the bureaucratization of social institutions and the spread of money-exchange relations to all forms of contacts between individuals are inevitable. Thus, it is possible to develop a rigid social system of social relations, within which each person feels like an extra, a puppet, a performer of a role imposed on him from the outside, a particle of an impersonal beginning - a crowd. A vivid illustration of this thought can be found in many of Charlie Chaplins films, whose main idea is to show the tragedy of an individual in an industrial society. One of the manifestations of the dehumanization of art was the emergence of a new genre - dystopia.
carnival beginning , expressionism , grotesque , metaphor , modernism , puppet , puppeteer , trickster , vulgarity
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Aktobe Regional University, Aktobe, Kazakhstan
Aktobe Regional University
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