I.T. Kalashnikov’s novel The Daughter of the Merchant Zholobov and the Siberian Baroque. Article 2

The Baroque reveals the totally alienating nature of the world (people are left with religious resignation) and the alienating nature of the I that is devoid of self-identity. People depend on the environment and are humiliated. The novel describes scenes of violence, death, moral sacrifice. The image of death, with some mystical exaltation (deaths of Zholobov and Krylov), sharpens the contrast of the symbolic and the naturalistic, the low and the high. The narrative mixes rationalism and mysticism, laughter and tragedy, explicates the theme of sin and punishment, the idea of temporality (the Baroque topic of Vanitas). People’s dependence on the external forces causes the general problem of the correlation of fate and personal will. The dual expression of the theme of fate makes the author use the category “wonderful” which can be attributed to the case, to the person’s wil and to God’s providence. In the novel, different characters are equal when they reflect the overall plot of fate and the related problem of theodicy. In the context of the attitude to the dictates of external circumstances several general groups of characters can be classified differing in the nature of their activity: 1. Religious Stoics (pietism, Baroque resignation to fate); 2. Voluntaryists (negative characters who suffer punishment in the end: Buza, Krylov, Gruzdev, Stukalenko and others); 3. Neudachin, the intermediate type (partly Alesey and Natalia as passive variants). The person is singled out through the reflection in the environment: through similarity and difference with other people, things, various cultural archetypes. Archetypes that are Baroque in nature include: the archetype of the repentant sinner (Gruzdev, Krylov, robber Korovin), the prodigal son (Alesey, Isakovna’s husband), the pretender (Pirushkin). In The Daughter of the Merchant Zhol-obov the theme of Don Juan is culturally and ideologically actualized in the Baroque exposingly brutal way through the type of a sinner who is haunting an innocent victim and tramples all divine laws. For each separate character all the people in the plot are important; the character dynamically interacts with them and thus enters the whole of the spiritual and national content. When describing the folk world, Kalashnikov follows the tradition of the comic “low” democratic Baroque. The weakening of the aesthetic integrity promotes “heteroglossia” and sharp stylistic heterogeneity, which is a common feature of the narrative in the Baroque and in realism. The author uses genre-verbal substrates with high illocutionarity and performativity: prayer, curse, legend, author’s comment (which proves the real basis of certain cases, reality etc.), historical remark. The priority of words over reality, their pacifying and normalizing role are important. The content of the structural (vertical) connections between the artistic elements (images, motifs, etc.) is significant; it is not subject to cause-and-event relations (horizontal), it even prevails over them. This includes, first and foremost, the principle of various repetitions in the artistic structure of the novel. The composition of the novel, externally amorphous at first glance, has a secret principle of internal order.

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