The chronotope of the short novel by V. Rasputin “Farewell to Matyora”: its ethnopoetic aspect

The analysis of the artistic originality of V. G. Rasputin's novel “Farewell to Mаtyora” in the aspect of ethnopoetics reveals the ideas of “soil-bound” tradition that became the basis of the aesthetics and axiology of his works. The spatial and temporal coordinates and loci of the story present the essence of the global conflict: eternity and modernity, culture and civilization, nature and man, the good and the evil. The chronotope of the story as an expression of the national picture of the world is presented in the conflict of the sacral and profane spaces in modern times. The sacral space and time are a synthesis of natural and human existence and has corresponding coordinate axes: the vertical one is the “Royal listven” and a church, the horizontal one is Angara and Matyora. The name of the island and the village has several semantic meanings: mother, mother-lend, mother-homeland, omnipotent, continent, spiritual continent, peasant Atlantean. Matyora as part of the national Cosmo-Logos is presented in a mythopoetic perspective as a living, intelligent, sensitive being, whose soul is the zoomorphic image of the “Owner of the island”. The image of the Angara river as the most important horizontal sacred topos, organizing the chronotope of the story, incorporates the national archetypal connotations of the river-life, the river-road, the river-movement, acquires the strongly marked symbolic semantics of time, which is associated with the tragic collision of the onset of the “last times”. The image of the “Royal listven”, that organizes the vertical axis of the chronotope, incorporates the features of the archetype of the world tree and the national totem, symbolizing the indestructibility of eternal nature, the short-term “Pyrrhic victory” of man. The profane space is marked by images of the “lower”, infernal world and a binary opposition “Owner/time-traveler”. The poetics of the story has a strongly-pronounced Orthodox code, which gives to the finale of the story a truly apocalyptic sound.