Byzantine Satirical Dialogue as a Stage in the Historical Poetics of the Posthumous Narration

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Abstract

The article considers two Byzantine satires, describing the descent into Hades (“Timarion” and “Mazaris’s Journey”), as a stage in the historical poetics of posthumous narration, or the narration from beyond the grave, i. e. the narration of a character who, in the conventional reality of the inner world of the work, is represented as a dead character. This paradoxical phenomenon, which is widespread in the literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, has been so far understudied in the diachronic aspect, from the perspective of its genesis and evolution. The article demonstrates both the continuity of the two works under study in relation to the “dialogues of the dead” by Lucian from Samosata, and the innovations made by their authors that bring “Timarion” and “Mazaris” closer to modern posthumous narrative not only on the motive-thematic, but also on compositional level. Special attention is paid to such elements as the motivation for the journey to the afterworld, the structure of the afterlife and its relationship with the world of the living, the degree of permeability of the border between the two worlds, the figures of the narrators, the combination of ancient and Christian ideas. A conclusion is made about the divergence of two lines of a previously uniform tradition and the formation of the genre of vision, on the one hand (when the narrator visits the afterlife while being alive and then returns from there), and the posthumous narration (when the narrator makes his journey while being dead, and his journey has only one vector), on the other hand.

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V. B. Zuseva-Özkan

A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Author for correspondence.
Email: v.zuseva.ozkan@gmail.com

Doct. Sci. (Philol.), Leading Researcher, Head of the Department of European and American Contemporary Literature

Russian Federation, Moscow

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