Categories of “own” and “alien” in Peter Hoeg's novel miss Smilla's feeling for snow

The article examines the categories of “own” and “alien” using Peter Høeg’s bestselling novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), which addresses compelling issues of modern Scandinavian society. The main character Smilla, half Danish, half Greenlander, tries to find out who is responsible for the tragic death of her neighbors’ small boy. She was born in Greenland, spent her childhood there and grew up in Denmark, so the investigation helps Smilla to understand her place in the modern world. The categories of “own” and “alien” are closely intertwined both in Smilla’s mind and in the surrounding reality. The authors analyzed which components constituted the picture of the heroine’s world and determined the etymology of the categories of “own” and “alien”. Various methods of culturological and literary text analysis, the method of selective commenting, the descriptive method, and component analysis were chosen as the main research methods. The results showed that Smilla still calls herself a Greenlander, but does not deny the influence of life in Denmark on her personality.