Myth-epic history of the Volga Germans: to the question of genre conventions of the novel by Guzel Yakhina “My Children”

The novel by the contemporary writer Guzel Yakhina “My Children” was published in 2018 and aroused great interest among experts: the unique style and pathos of this work, its characters, structure, intertextual connections and much more were discussed. In this article, we set ourselves the goal of defining the genre of this novel and pointing out its phenomenal nature from the point of view of the dialectic of the epic. Based on the theoretical developments of A. N. Veselovsky, M. M. Bakhtin and Yu. M. Lotman on the laws of development of verbal art, we put forward a hypothesis that the novel “My Children” has a transtextual connection with the cultural history of the Volga Germans, and its concept and composition demonstrates signs of a mytho-epic epic. In the course of the study, we used cultural-historical, structural-semantic, philological and comparative methods. In the course of scientific analysis, we achieved the following results: we found out that the events in the novel unfold against the background of tragic national and historical events; We analyzed the image of Schulmeister Bach from the point of view of the functions of a cultural hero; paid attention to the prose-poetic style of the novel and its quasi-historical pathos; described the mytho-epic chronotope and topoi, and also dwelt in detail on the analysis of the system of characters: the “wonderful” wife, the antagonist, the rebellious children. Based on the results obtained, we concluded that the structural and systemic organization of the text of Guzel Yakhina’s novel “My Children” corresponds to the functions, genre and stylistic conventions of the mytho-epic epic and gave a definition of this genre, the mytho-epic novel. In conclusion, we emphasized that we are dealing with a phenomenon of transmission and stylization of a legend. Even the book itself (AST Publishing House) is organized as a publication of an epic monument: there is an appendix in the form of the “Calendar of Y. I. Bach” and a cultural and historical commentary. This study seems timely to us, since a new direction has emerged in modern literature – ethno-epic and mytho-epic novels, which, in our opinion, fit into Veselovsky’s theory of the dialectic of the epic.

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