THE DEATH OF A CLOSE PERSON AS A TEST OF TWO CHILDHOOD POETICS: MENTAL AND ACTIONAL EVENTS IN TOLSTOY, AKSAKOV AND OYBEK

Abstract

The article compares one narrative situation, the death of a close person as experienced by a child narrator, in three autobiographical tales of childhood: Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood (the death of the mother and the grief of Natalya Savishna), Sergei Aksakov’s Years of Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson (the death of the grandfather) and Oybek’s Bolalik (the death of the younger brother Hoji). The three works belong to one genre-narrative type, the memory-analytic tale of childhood built on the idyllic household chronotope, which makes the comparison typologically legitimate. Using Valery Tyupa’s distinction between mental and actional events and Lidiya Ginzburg’s classification of direct and indirect forms of psychological depiction, the article shows that the same situation is constructed as a mental event in the Russian texts, where the child’s inner state is named, analysed and explained by the narrator, and as an interactional event in the Uzbek text, where the inner state is not named and is conveyed through the visible signs of other people and two bodily details of the narrator himself. The opposite proportion in which the two traditions use the same devices is interpreted as the expression of two concepts of childhood, an ontogenetic-psychological one and an axiological-moral one, and not as a difference of skill.