CONCEPTS OF BUDDHIST EMPTINESS AND ILLUSORY IN L.A. YUZEFOVICH's NOVEL “THE PRINCE OF THE WIND”

Abstract

The article analyzes L.Yuzefovich's artistic interpretation of the key ideas of Buddhism in the novel “Prince of the Wind” - the ideas of emptiness and illusory reality. According to Buddhist ideas, reality is illusory, because in fact it is empty of the mind that perceives it. On the contrary, immanently anxious human mind constantly generates an illusory reality. The plot of the “Prince of the Wind” is built on numerous fictions produced by narrators, each of whom can be called a “prince of the wind”, that is, the one who creates ghosts. In the illusory reality designated by the author, many things and phenomena turn out to be conditional, including the boundaries between cultures - the eastern and the western, the Russian and the Mongolian Buddhist cultures. This cultures mirror each other in the mystical and in the real history. Fates of the Russian characters and the space in which they exist are filled with Buddhist signs. Buddhist emptiness and illusory nature in the novel also turn out to be metaphors of the eschatological state of the Mongolian and the Russian statehood at the beginning of the last century, metaphors of the disintegrating time and space.