UNREALISM IN THE NOVEL "THE RETURN OF THE BUDDHA" BY G. GAZDANOV

Abstract

The article contains an idea of the novel "The Return of the Buddha" as an unrealistic work. The aspects of the mysterious plot of the novel in the ratio of external and internal plots, unreal and factual are touched upon. It is proposed to consider the precedent of F. Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" to this novel by G. Gazdanov both in terms of the motive for the murder, and in terms of love longing for the deceased (absent) heroines, allusively directing both to Lenore from E. Poe's "Raven", and more broadly to the orphic plot initiating an attempt to meet with a lover who is in the otherworldly, subtle world. Special attention is paid to the plot stratification of the novel. Selection of plot levels (sublevels) corresponds to the very essence of Gazdanov's style, in which reality seems imaginary, and what is hidden from superficial reflection forms the true meaning of the text. The artistic originality of the writer's style is not based on the direct duality of the mystical and the real, but oscillates between what pretends to be reality and what is seen as ghostly. Reality is annihilated only in the neo-mythological plane of the "superauthor" who establishes the value series of the work. The Buddhist element is taken as a gaze into the current reality and in parallel with maithuna, a specific Buddhist practice in which the achievement of enlightenment is carried out by immersion in disgusting debauchery. "The Return of the Buddha" is metatextually compared with the previous novels of G. Gazdanov. The mythopoetic contour associated with the contemplative and mortal figure of Narcissus is marked. The closing course of the phenomenological thought of the author is the hero's self-healing from the obsessions that haunt him, reduced to the perspective of a "different" life, free from dreaming and contingent, dependence on the unconscious and the otherworldly, which converge in this work and represent one nature hostile to the harmonious state of man.