The chronotope of subjective reality in the novel work of Lena Eltang

This article examines the actual literary concept - chronotope; various theoretical and methodological approaches to the interpretation of the concept are characterized, including in the understanding of the interrelated terms time, space, composition, text architectonics, genre features. The theoretical works on the chronotope of a literary work are analyzed, including studies that pay attention to the chronotope of subjective reality. The article concludes that this issue has been little theoretically studied in the literature. The aim of the article is to analyze the chronotope of subjective reality in the novels of the modern writer Lena Eltang. The peculiarities of the spatio-temporal organization of texts, as well as the specificity of the genre (the texts have specific features of a «novel about a novel») and the peculiarities of the narrative of the novels under consideration, allow us to speak of a subjective representation of artistic space and time. The article sequentially examines four novels of the author: «The Escape of the Kumanika», «Stone Maples», «Other Drums» and «Cartagena». In Eltang»s novels, narrators create texts: diaries, letters, sometimes - works of art; these texts, being created within the already text of the novel, represent an additional mimetic reality that exists additionally, above the novel reality. Accordingly, space and time of texts are fragmented, stratified, they are difficult to measure, as a result of which the chronotope of novels is conditional, relative. The space and time of texts is often structured by the consciousness of their novel narrators, who create their own artistic realities and their conventional worlds. The space of novels becomes multilevel, multidimensional, the chronotope of novels is biased; the article concludes that the subjective chronotope is the leading chronotope of the Romans of Lena Eltang.