Image of Russia in Julian Barnes’s Novels “Flaubert’s Parrot” and “The Noise of Time”

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to determine specificity of the image of Russia in the novels “Flaubert’s Parrot” and “The Noise of Time” by Julian Barnes. The study is novel in that it is the first to demonstrate how the image of Russia fits into the context of a postmodernist work and correlates with the idea of chaos, irony and culture mixing. As a result, it is proved that the image of Russia is based, on the one hand, on national myths and stereotypes and, on the other hand, on works of the classical Russian literature. The former are used to describe everyday life and are inextricably linked to such phenomena as alcohol abuse, the image of the “brown bear”, etc. In the second case, there are constant references to Turgenev, Nabokov, Shostakovich, the so-called high culture.

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: April 15, 2021.
• Published: May 31, 2021.

Keywords

• образ России
• британский постмодернизм
• Джулиан Барнс
• смешение культур
• идея хаоса
• image of Russia
• British postmodernism
• Julian Barnes
• culture mixing
• idea of chaos

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