Axiology of the author and the hero in Victor Astafyev’s short novels of the 1990s: «The Jolly Soldier»

In Victor Astafyev’s story «The Jolly Soldier» («Veselyy soldat») the memories of character-narrator are organised by an inner psychological and ethical motivation, i. e. experience of a murder committed during a war. The virtue of memory and writing is explicit in the very narrative principles, although its relativity is obvious to the author-demiurge. Memory is selective, and writing (literary work) cannot change the world (ill repetition of history and social life motive), but both are important for an individual life-experience as a measure of its value and one's responsibility. This experience includes the character’s utilitarian and vital values of various kind, due to his age and physiology. Being a part of the narrator’s range of vision, the values are shaped by the context of his life and therethrough by a different understanding of the social, the ancestral, the ontological and the existential. The narrator sees the character as a part of a nation. Therefore his fate is but a part of the people’s fate. Scenes, where either a character himself or other characters advocate personal dignity, are an important element of the narration. The author forms a unified subject - advocacy of personal dignity as a value in this world. This subject completes the meaning of the title: «Jolly soldier» is not just a name given to the character by the others, it is also the author’s understanding of a human place in the existence. Thus, a human is a soldier, a defender of life from all kind of destructive forces (national, historical and social, both inner and outer). Value worlds, both of character and narrator, are united on the archetypal level by authordemiurge, who states the diversity of existence. This level is organised with the order/chaos opposition for the diversity needs to be structured by the mind and the human values. Any forms of order establishment bring structure and justice in the social chaos. Therefore they are stated as valuable. The author shows the evolution of human’s consciousness via the plot of the story: from the group consciousness and the values on the character’s level (orphanage, army) to the national - on the narrator’s level, and to the universal and existential as a personal guilt and responsibility for humanity and for the human - on the demiurge consciousness’ level. The features of narration, fable and plot reveal that the axiology of author-demiurge in the «author’s» prose is not equal to the value worlds both of the character and the narrator though all three are autobiographically close.

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