Specific Features of Protagonists' Literary Reflections in the Writings of Svetlana Alexievich (Zinky Boys)

This article investigates literary reflection as an expression of self-awareness and self-identification of characters in literature. Based on the reading circle and interpretation of literary texts, the characters' self-awareness and self-identification, and the author-hero-reader relationship's originality are revealed. The article is based on the "novel of voices" Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich. The phenomenological, hermeneutic, structural and semiotic, receptive, historical and cultural, historical and literary-based research methods are used in this study. The study has revealed that literary reflection is the characters' reflection on the books they read, the storytellers' reflection on what has been read, and the finalizing aesthetic view of the author's reflection. It is proved that the "live voices" in the novel Zinky Boys convey the feel of self-presence of the characters themselves. Simultaneously, the transformation of the voices into an "arena of writing" makes it possible to highlight their dissimilarity. The aesthetic transformation of the stories heard into generalizing signs and the signifier takes place. It is argued that, in Zinky Boys, the official Soviet myths about the Afghan war are juxtaposed with the social and existential experience of officers, employees, and their relatives: wives and mothers. Literature - such works as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Gadfly by Ethel Lilian Voinich, The Catcher in the Rye by Jerome David Salinger, fables of Ivan Krylov, the essay "Afghan Madonnas" of the war journalist Pyotr Studenikin, and unwritten stories of participants of the war - plays a vital role in shaping this experience. The authors of the article conclude that the literary texts of the participants in the Afghan war reveal one of the essential principles of the writer's literary-documentary prose: the principle of reconstruction. Reconstruction of experienced events by the storytellers, reconstruction of the recorded stories by the author, reconstruction by the reader of the social and cultural context of the novel and with the help of these facts creating one's alternative history of this war. Another critical factor in Zinky Boys is the author's aesthetic view on the characters-storytellers. It is the view of belonging as a collective living-survival experience of the Afghan war, as "complicity of the author and fact". The author aesthetically conceptualizes, summarizes, and completes the literary reflection of the characters-storytellers in Zinky Boys. It is primarily due to this that documentary prose transforms into literary-documentary one. The recorded "live voices" also transform into a "novel of voices".

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