Local text oppositions in the literary prose of Pavlodar (based on the material of the Pavlodar memoir literature of the 1930s)

I.  O. Prihodchenko

* pisosenko@mail.ru

Musakhan Kanapyanov Higher College of the Pavlodar Pedagogical University, Pavlodar, Republic of Kazakhstan

FDostoevsky Omsk State University, Omsk, Russian Federation

Local text oppositions in the literary prose of Pavlodar (based on the material of the Pavlodar memoir literature of the 1930s)

Abstract: This article is devoted to mental oppositions in the local literary text of Pavlodar of the 1930s. The memoirs of Abram Veniaminovich Mil and Gennady Arsenyevich Beshkarev, who lived in Pavlodar in the late 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, were used as research materials. The article focuses on the implementation of the opposition “province vs capital” in memoirs and the peculiarities of the embodiment of Pavlodar image in the minds of authors though they were not Pavlodar born and bred residents. As a result of motivational, associative and comparative analysis, it can be concluded that for both authors Pavlodar of the first third of the 20th century appeared to be a typically provincial city i.e. small, backward and unsuitable for civilized life. The chronotope of Pavlodar in the memoir prose of these authors is similar to the chronotope of a provincial town given by Bakhtin: time flows slowly in such a space, it seems to thicken and get stuck, the course of history is not noticeable here. Coinciding in the set of leading features of Pavlodar provinciality, the authors differed in their assessment: Mil perceived Pavlodar as a remote corner of the Central Asian colony of pre-revolutionary Russia; Beshkarev saw Pavlodar as a young up-and-coming Soviet city requiring cultural development.

Keywords: local text, memoirs, Pavlodar, mentality, opposition, province.

Paper submitted: March 23, 2022.

For citation: Prihodchenko I. O. (2022). Local text oppositions in the literary prose of Pavlodar (based on the material of the Pavlodar memoir literature of the 1930s). Russian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 60–69. DOI: 10.17238/issn1998-5320.2022.16.2.7.

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