VALUE OPPOSITION IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE MODERN STORY OF THE VOLGA REGION (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE MARI, CHUVASH AND TATAR LITERATURES)

Raisia Kudryavtseva¹, Tatiana Belyaeva²*, Jury Antonov³

¹Prof. Dr., Mari State University, RUSSIA, kudsebs@rambler.ru
²Assoc. Prof. Dr., Mari State University, RUSSIA, sokolova_beljaeva@mail.ru

³Prof. Dr., N. P. Ogarev Mordovia State University, RUSSIA, antonov-ug69@yandex.ru
*Corresponding author

Abstract

The compositional basis of the majority stories of the Volga region’s modern writers is made by the opposition based on contrast images and concepts: old and new ways of life, parents and children, traditional and modern morality, water and electric mill, girls’ voices during the haymaking and noise of a car, etc. The antithesis is defined by conceptual and semantic opposition and appears as the method or the principle of composition of the artistic work.

Two oppositions come to the forefront in the story of the Volga region’s peoples. The first opposition is «parents and children», which is realized through the value-significant and emotionally colored motifs of abandoned forgotten or misunderstood old people and their self-occupied, soulless (ungrateful) children. The second, more generalized, socially significant opposition is the traditional and modern Mari village with their diametrically opposed ideological and value attitudes.

In this context, it is easy to correlate between themselves the stories of multi-national writers, in whose artistic works the antithesis is presented as the main method of composition: Mari (Gennady Gordeev, Valery Berdinsky, Gennady Alekseev, Yury Artamonov, etc.), Chuvash (Arseny Tarasov, Denis Gordeev, Svetlana Azamat, Valentina Taravat, etc.), Tatar (Rif Rahman, Zinur Husniyar and others). The basis of this research is a comparative analysis of 2 groups of stories: 1) three stories, united by the theme of parents and children, which is solved within the axiological art paradigm (Valery Berdinsky’s «My Children», Arseny Tarasov’s «Two in old age» and Rif Rahman’s «Cricket») 2) two stories based on the opposition of the outgoing (traditional) and new ways of life of the Mari village (Gennady Gordeev’s «Water mill» and Denis Gordeev’s «Time by Yakrav»).

The authors actualize in them the most important ethnic and eternal moral values (memory of the past, harmony life with nature, people’s ethics, family traditions, spirituality, care, fellowship, duty, responsibility, etc.), opposing them disvalues (oblivion of the foretime, ignoring of traditions, egoism, spiritual poverty, etc.).

The attention of the authors is focused on dramatic nature of the real-life situation of the key (positive) characters of the former Mari world, on research of the psychological component of their existence.

The images of old men and old villages, created by writers, not only fix the state of modern reality, but also contain nostalgia of the authors on the inviolable value priorities of human existence in the world, the authors’ thoughts about improvement of the world through the memory of the past.

Keywords: modern Mari literature, modern Chuvash literature, modern Tatar literature, story, art axiology, poetics, opposition.