Editorial

Fiction is a very big word. It covers a multitude of meanings. Fiction is a lie, but it is a very special kind of lie. It is a lie because it is not true to fact, but it is true to experience.

So when we come to discuss fiction, we come to discuss experience as such, both generalized and individual. Individual experience is very difficult to render, because it has to be translated into many other experiences, translated and interpreted. When we speak about fiction we have to say that centuries ago it was based on logic for the most part. The thing is, it is not natural for a human being to think logically. Our natural way of thinking is in associations and it makes our experience unique. Logic was invented by human beings as an instrument of rendering individual experiences in order to make them understandable for other people. When we say experience we mean both factual and emotional experience, and the most important impact that literature had at that time was dependant on the ability of the writer to produce an emotional effect on the reader getting him or her emotionally involved.

When we try to investigate modern fiction we may assume that the approach has been changed. Now it is not only getting the reader emotionally involved but intellectually involved as well. And in this respect we consider it one of the main purposes of the author to make the reader participate - not only in analyzing (disassembling) the text, but in generating (assembling) it as well.

Now the authors do not only appeal to our emotional experience but represent the factual reality that is the source of associations, showing that even in this way our experiences overlap. No longer do they emphasise only emotional experience but also that factual reality which is the source of associations, properly arranged and represented, thus enabling the reader to see that our experiences overlap, to identify with the characters, their way of life, their whereabouts and conditions that inevitably tell on the character. You go step by step along the road from innocence to knowledge, acquiring more and more experience. It is the law of addition and accumulation that shows you how to specify experience and to supply the necessary characteristics.

And they are all about the human beings, because the human being is in the centre of all good literature. That is what we have learnt during the Seminars and workshops and this is the approach we are trying to explain to our students.

We believe that this journal, Footpath, is a brain-path to new ways of understanding British literature, poetry, drama and new ideas about using contemporary British novels in teaching. The books chosen by Oxford-Russia fund for the project are sure to appeal to you and to enrich you in many respects as they deal with different facets of human experience.

The collection of contemporary British books, distributed by the Oxford - Russia Fund among about seventy Russian universities and many institutions to which they have reached out, such as libraries, English ‘centres’, schools and literary clubs, provides an opportunity to develop our understanding of contemporary British culture and social tendencies. We used to deal with a limited number of world-famous British authors. Such great books formed a concept of Britain for several generations of Russian people - “Nice Avork! ” some people say, but countries change, people change and books change. The “iron curtain” was opened for Russian people and the global virtual vault of gigabytes of information flooded headlong into the inner world of Russian students. Bookshelves in local bookshops are overloaded with translations of fiction from all over the world. It is possible to order any book via the Internet nowadays. But it is the choice that makes it difficult. So here comes the project which guides the teachers, the students, the scholars through the wood of contemporary novels. In order not to turn the whole big idea into the scene similar to that in one of Bruegel’s pictures saying that “if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into the ditch” the project has grown into a big international programme on the national scale.

It started with the ideas of a small group of people in Oxford and Perm, who studied, analyzed, loved and taught literature. Supported by the Oxford - Russia Fund, they decided to share their knowledge and understanding of contemporary British fiction. Within years the group has grown bigger and bigger, attracting hundreds of Russian, and former CIS teachers, translators of contemporary British literature, students, graduate and postgraduate students, university administration, editors, British authors and scholars, people who understand English quite well and those who can’t make out a word of what we are writing about right now, people who can speak other languages and read world literature as well and people who only started to penetrate into the world of British fiction.

Karen Hewitt and Professor Boris Proskurnin, the editorial board, the group of scholars, involved in the project, meet, email, and phone to discuss the books, the articles, the structure of the journal, the annual meetings, etc. The interest in the novels involved in the project has grown hugely and there is even a generation of graduate students who have “swallowed” all of the project books during their studies. Such a fact proves that the experiment in love for British fiction has turned into an effective nationwide system of teaching contemporary British literature. The project has become more organized, more structured, the books have been absorbed by Russian academic society, new ideas have been born thanks to less than twenty British novels. And all these positive outcomes wouldn’t have been possible without careful selection, expertise and the organization work of the Oxford-Perm think tank. Footpath is a unique opportunity for scholars, teachers and now students to show how they understand these particular British novels, how to analyze them, how to draw implications and how to implement the teaching of books in a classroom.

The choice of books, provided by the Oxford - Russia Fund, speaks volumes. The novels are different in content and in form. The action of the novels can be set in an educational institution (An Experiment in Love, Nice Work, About a Boy, Black Swan Green), in a factory (Nice Work), at the seaside (The Sea House), in a village (Waterland, Black Swan Green, Ulverton), in a big city (About a Boy, Magpie, White Teeth, The Taxi Driver’s Daughter, Portobello), in different settings (A History of the World in Ten and Half Chapters, Atonement, Master Georgie) and in other locations. The time period is also different from novel to novel: Nice Work and What a Carve Up! are set in the 1980s, Regeneration in the First World War, Atonement in the Second World War, Master Georgie in the Crimean War and Morality Play in the fourteenth century. But whatever the time and location the most important thing is the variety of experiences investigated by the writers, from the vivid multi-cultural liveliness of White Teeth to the reflective study of a deaf artist in love in The Sea House. Every writer teaches us a lesson of life that may be not true to fact but is by all means true to experience, and thus may be estimated on the universal scale.

Zadie Smith in White Teeth teaches us to live with diversity, which is most important in our time when the world has become a very small and vulnerable place both literally and figuratively. The novel, which explores the issues of multiculturalism in Great Britain and the complicated nature of relationships between people, illustrates the idea of living with diversity and makes the reader understand that we are all unique and at the same time have much in common despite the colour of the skin, the age, the language, etc.

Nick Hornby in About a Boy, exploring the idea of maturity and showing what it means to be a child and what it means to be a man, teaches us a seemingly simple but global lesson: seemingly little things make us go on living, for they determine our emotional ties. They show us who we are and whom we need. True happiness comes only when you belong, you lose a lot in this case but the gain is much greater.

Jill Dawson combines the issues mentioned above in Magpie, for she also shows the life in a multicultural society and she also tells a story of growing-up and a story of loss. But notwithstanding the losses Lily (the main character) has to overcome and the choices she has to make, the gain is much greater as well. And we are taught one more lesson of life: any loss can be either negative or positive, everything depends upon a person, because every loss is certainly an end of something but every end means commencement, starting a new leaf.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement, being one of the best samples of the British classic literature of the 1990s, has an ecclesiastic resonance. Playing with the brutalities of life, McEwan explores shame, guilt and forgiveness, interpretations and misunderstanding, and the difficulty of absolution. He puts forward a question whether atonement can be achieved, and the answer is not very reassuring...

We may go on praising one novel at the expense of another but the conclusion will remain the same: once a wheel of experience is set up, the process of accumulation can not be stopped, we are all unique but while reading we share our experience and come to understand, like the English poet and preacher, John Donne, that “no man is an island entire of itself every man is a piece of the continent”.

Ryazan,

Ryazan State University named for S.Yesenin