The border of life and death as the basis of collisions in stories on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

This article examines the texts of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka and Lu Xun, which unfold at the junction of the everyday and mystical, real and infernal. This examina tion allows us to systematically describe, firstly, the forms and directions of the self-reflection of storytellers who comprehend the border of life and death, and secondly, the ontology that forms the basis of the artistic world of texts from the 1870s to the 1920s. In all four texts, the border of death – a grave or a monument – forms the basis of the chronotope and becomes the soil for the concentration of value experiences that organize the inner world of a person. The article’s starting point is the position that a “cemetery” text inevitably reflects the reli gious and cosmogonic ideas of the author and contains the coordinates of their world-building. The issues of connection between the hero’s collision with death and the ethical choice the hero makes are covered in detail. Comparative typological analysis allows us to highlight the semantic halo of collisions re peated in texts, including a transition to oneiric space, a test, a chance for correction, and a mod eling of an intermediate world in which a person, freed from social obligations and fears, shows the fullness of his “I”, and the sentence passed on him by the author and higher powers.