Carnival mythopoetics of V. Aksenov’s novel “Moscow ow ow”

Abstract

The interrelation between the novel and Aksyonov’s autobiographical essay “In Search of Melancholy Baby” is traced. The mythopoetics of the novel reveals the contamination of two social myths of the 20th century – the revolutionary utopia, which gave birth to socialist Russia (Bolshevik, Stalinist) and the American democratic myth, which formed the consciousness of Aksyonov’s generation and the attempt to implement which gave birth to post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s. The heroes of the novel are analyzed as “people of two utopias”. The mythological poetics of Aksyonov’s novel is associated with a carnival world perception. We reveal the style of the menippea in the novel, with its violation of the generally accepted and usual course of events, reflecting the era of a person's any external position de-valuation, the epic integrity destruction. We present the basic features of the carnival chronotope, which asserts the “merry relativity” of every position, as the dominant of the novel’s mythopoetics. We substantiate that, as in Dostoevsky’s novels, we have a special carnival chronotope – “carnival as a way of life”, which erodes all moral concepts and condemns its participants to death. The key images for analysis are labyrinth, Minotaur, modern Theseus, perishing in the labyrinth of his historical time. The poet in the novel is seen as the creator of its main mythological meanings and a man of utopia. We conclude that utopian consciousness leads to transformations, inversion of ideas, concepts, which is explored by menippean poetics.