“The hunting of the Snark” by L. Carroll in the novel by M. Petrosyan “The house in which...”

The purpose of this work is to understand the functioning of L. Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark” in M. Petrosyan’s novel “The House where...” and to identify additional meanings that arise due to the interaction of the two texts. The reception of L. Carroll’s works in the novel by M. Petrosyan has not been studied yet, despite the fact that the intertextuality of the work is noted in research papers. In the novel, “The Hunting of the Snark” appears together with a number of references to other works by Lewis Carroll, such as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, “The Walrus and the Carpentef’. However, the consistent quoting of the “The Hunting of the Snark” in the epigraphs allows us to interpret this poem as a key text. It was found that in most cases the correlation between the epigraphs from the “The Hunting of the Snark” and the corresponding chapters is purely formal: epigraphs correlate with insignificant episodes that do not require explanation. However, the epigraphs from Carroll’s poem support the strategy of searching for hidden meaning, which is important for M. Petrosyan’s novel. L. Carroll’s poem helps clarify the essence of one of the protagonists of “The House where...” - Jackal Tabaqui, who is engaged in hunting like Snark hunters, and is the author of oral and written nonsense-texts. Thus, Jackal Tabaqui appears as a kind of heir to the poetics of nonsense by L. Carroll. The narrative strategy of this character allows to convey to an attentive listener indirect information about the mystical nature of the House and of the flow of time, without violating numerous taboos within the world of the novel. The unity of the humorous, comic and tragic principles, expressed in Carroll’s poem, is realized in the image of Jackal Tabaqui. This character has a dual nature, being both a pupil of the House and the Master of Time.