“Piebald dog...” and “Black doe...”: humanistic prose of the 20th century and the theocentric book of the 21st century

The titles of the novels “Black Doe Running on the Foam of the Ocean Surf’ (2017) by Protopriest Alexander Torik and “Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore” (1977) by Chingiz Aitmatov are similar. Art space and time of both works are also similar; this is due to the “I-here-now” model. All this provides a basis for comparing the two works. “Piebald dog” is the name of a coastal rock; it is singular and immobile. Black doe is a dark-skinned girl runner. As the embodiment of the beauty of the universe, it appears three times (an unknown runner, the famous athlete Pamela Jelimo and the girl who has all the ways open to her). In Aitmatov’s prose, a valuable community of people is a genus. In Torik’s prose, the valuable community is the Church of Christ. It is eternal and one on earth and in Heaven. The world of Aitmatov’s prose is disharmonious due to the disintegration of the original cultural values. Aitmatov eclectically combines pagan ideas with atheistic ones; and the motifs of the victory of evil over good and self-destruction are invariant in his works. The connection between people and higher forces in his prose is marred by misunderstanding. The world of Torik’s theocentric prose is fundamentally ordered. There is no death here. When the hero crosses the border of earthly life, he meets his loved persons and Those to Whom he addressed his prayers. Aitmatov’s prose and other works of Russian humanistic literature of the 1960s-1980s largely precede the theocentric book. The image of a space in which the earth, the sea and the sky form an organic unity is created. The value of the present time, in which the hero chooses the difficult path and confronts evil, is established. In the artistic world of his novels, the visible and the invisible already interact, and the heroes cross the “coastline”.