Zen Buddhist Motifs in A. Makushinsky’s novel ‘The Stopped World’

Abstract

The article aims to comprehend the impact of Zen Buddhism, its philosophical positions and practices on the problems and poetics of the novel by A. Makushinsky The Stopped World. The Buddhist influence in the novel is manifested in the literary implementation of the principles of the emptiness of reality, the illusory nature of the human ‘I’, the relativity of time and space, and also in the features of the created characters, landscapes and interiors, in the organization of the chronotope. Based on the results of the study, it can be stated that in The Stopped World A. Makushinsky not only depicts the world perceived in meditation by means of a thorough and detailed analysis of all components of reality but also literally depicts the world from meditation. The writer draws attention to the principle of universal connections of things showing the similarities of various characters in the novel. The Stopped World is looking for parallels that would most adequately explain what Zen and human consciousness are. Such parallels are sky and water, photography, architecture. Each of them expresses the dynamics that have become static, the fuss that has become peace, or the ‘stopped world’. The theoretical and methodological base of the work rests on the research conducted by V. Toporov (on the ‘Petersburg text’) and P. Alexeev (on the ‘Muslim text’): the precedent translation of the structural-semiotic approach from the urban-cultural into the religious sphere allows us to apply it also to the literary study of the presence of Buddhist ideas and motifs in the text. The relevance of the article is determined by the low level of knowledge of the presence of Buddhism in Russian literature as one of the world religions and one of the traditional religions of Russia. The article is novel in that it attempts to provide a consistent and broad study of the ‘Buddhist text’ of modern Russian literature based on thenovel The Stopped World by A. Makushinsky taking into account the writer’s poetic work.