Archetype grail in M. Yelizarov’s novel “librarian”

Abstract

The article is devoted to identification of an archetypic basis of the novel of M. Yelizarov “Librarian”. She contacts the medieval myth about Holy Grail. Numerous similarities between W. von Eschenbach’s novel “Parzival” and the novel of the modern Russian writer are found. The conducted observations have helped to identify semantic functions of the ancient layer in the contemporary narrative. Comparing the books by D. Gromov (a Soviet writer) with the Grail, the modern novelist deconstructs the Soviet myth about the literature’s salutariness, insisting on inhuman pathos of the biblio-idea of the Soviet culture. The drawn conclusions allow clarifying the disputes on Yelizarov’s novel and also to raise an ideological question of the literature’s and reading’s sacralization – both in the Soviet period and in the present time. In the latter, this tendency is found in the popular literature telling us about the reader and also about advantage of reading in a sci-journalistic discourse. The explanation of this tendency is suggested as well. © Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved.