HOUSE - COSMOS - BODY: MYTHOPOETICS IN SLAVIC PROSE OF THE 1990S (OLGA TOKARCZUK AND GORAN PETROVIĆ)
The article examines the mythopoetics of house in the Slavic prose of the 1990s. The research draws upon such sources as the novels by Serbian writer Goran Petrović “An Atlas Traced By the Sky” and by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk “House of Day, House of Night”. In the world literature the image of house is undoubtedly recurrent one resting topical irrespective of an epoch’s style and literary direction. At the end of the XX century the theme of acquiring ideological and spiritual orientations becomes important for literatures of a number of Slavic countries (due to deep social and political transformations). In these circumstances the image of house acquires special meanings coming to be the incarnation of timeless moral constant. The artistic perception of house becomes popular within a mythopoetic context and through the prism of categories “top-bottom”, “mine-yours”, “light-shadow”, “dream-reality”, “space-time”, “cosmos-man”, essential for ancient profane consciousness. And it is the last pair of categories the author pays special attention to: the mythopoetic analogies between house and Creation on the one hand and house and human body on the other. Postmodernist aesthetics and poetics could not but influence the prose of the period under study what is clearly demonstrated by the analyzed novels. However, the postmodernism in Slavic literatures acquired a special, peculiar outlook, revealing itself to a high degree on the external level while demonstrating rootedness into the classical tradition on a deep-seated level, one of the convincing proofs of which is the symbolics of house.