Жамият ва инновациялар –
Общество и инновации –
Society and innovations
Journal home page:
https://inscience.uz/index.php/socinov/index
The image of the hero in the stories of Zakhar Prilepin (on the
example of the collection “Sin”)
Madinabonu AKHMEDOVA
1
National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Article history:
Received June 2021
Received in revised form
20 June 2021
Accepted 15 July 2021
Available online
15 August 2021
The article is devoted to comprehending the image of the hero
in the stories of Zakhar Prilepin. With the help of typological and
holistic methods of analyzing a literary work, the most important
properties that characterize the “new hero” in the writer’s works
established marginality, lack of clear life guidelines, and a
tendency to reflection. With the “difference” of fate – the main
characters in the collection “Sin”: experiencing a tragic military
experience – Zakhar (“Sergeant”), who becomes the savior of his
soldiers. The heroes depicted as genuine; looking for their own
place in the new socio-cultural realities, the unifying link in the
stories of the collection “Sin” is the names of the main characters
– Zakhar.
2181-1415/© 2021 in Science LLC.
This is an open access article under the Attribution 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ru)
Keywords:
story,
hero,
type,
loneliness,
analysis.
Zakar Prilepin hikoyalarida qahramonning tasviri (“Gunoh”
hikoyalar to‘plami misolida)
ANNOTATSIYA
Kalit so‘zlar:
hikoya,
qahramon,
tip,
yolg‘izlik,
tahlil.
Maqola Zaxar Prilepinning hikoyalaridagi qahramon qiyofa-
sini tushunishga bag‘ishlangan. Adabiy asarni tahlil qilishning
tipologik va yaxlit usullari yordamida yozuvchi asarlaridagi
“yangi qahramon”ni tavsiflovchi eng muhim xususiyatlar
aniqlandi: hayotiylik chegarasi, aniq hayotiy ko‘rsatmalari
yo‘qligi, fikrlashga moyillik. Taqdirning “farqi” bilan – “Gunoh”
to‘plamining bosh qahramonlari: Zaxar (“Serjant”) fojiali harbiy
tajribani boshdan kechirmoqda, u o‘z askarlarining qutqaruv-
chisiga aylanadi. “Gunoh” to‘plamining hikoyalarida birlash-
tiruvchi bo‘g‘in – bosh qahramonlarning ismi – Zaxar bo‘lib, ular
chinakam tasvirlangan, yangi ijtimoiy – madaniy voqelikda o‘z
o‘rnini izlovchi obrazlardir.
1
Lecturer, National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
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Образ героя в рассказах Захара Прилепина (на примере
сборника «Грех»)
АННОТАЦИЯ
Ключевые слова:
рассказ,
герой,
тип,
одиночество,
анализ.
Статья посвящена осмыслению образа героя в рассказах
Захара Прилепина. С помощью типологического и
целостного методов анализа литературного произведения
установлены важнейшие свойства, характеризующие
«нового героя» в произведениях писателя: маргинальность,
отсутствие четких жизненных ориентиров, склонность к
рефлексии. При «разности» судеб – главных героев в
сборнике «Грех»: переживает трагический военный опыт –
Захар («Сержант»), который становится спасителем своих
солдат.
Герои
изображены
подлинными,
ищущими
собственное место в новых социокультурных реалиях,
объединяющим звеном в рассказах сборника «Грех»
является имена главных героев – Захар.
In the modern literary process in Russian prose, authors for the most part agree on
the consolidation of the presence of polyphony and multidirectional aesthetic searches for
words by contemporary artists. These topical areas will be examined by analyzing the
relationship between “author and hero” in the context of the stories of Zakhar Prilepin,
which, we believe, will not only show the originality of the genre.In addition, the typology
of the hero of the late XX – early XXI century, reflecting the true picture of the life of a
person of this period [1–6].
Since the publication of the first works of Zakhar Prilepin, his characters perceived
as “new heroes”, “heroes of our time”. All of them are strong personalities, often tough in
making decisions and actions, but at the same time endowed with the ability to total
reflection, not hardened even after the hardships of life or tragic experience, who have
learned the true value of being, trying to find their own place in the world. The collection
of stories by Zakhar Prilepin “Sin” is very indicative in this respect [7–12]. Prilepin’s heroes
are sentimental and at the same time ruthless, and their behavior is most often determine
by circumstances: they find themselves in difficult conditions, where the line between life
and death erased, and decisions must be make immediately. For example, in the story
“Carlson” throughout the entire story, the hero’s terrible loneliness and mental fatigue are
conveyed: “That spring I quit my pub, where I worked as a bouncer. Tenderness for the
world overwhelmed me so much that I decided to get a job in a foreign legion, as a
mercenary. I had to somehow calm myself, in any way. “Without a doubt, this “tenderness
for the world” was expressed in the hero’s anger and loneliness. His selfishness comes
largely not from selfishness, but from the surrounding spiritual emptiness and inner
spiritual emptiness, which he gradually tries to fill with reading, now drinking, now
fighting. From the first lines of the work, we learn that his property is a small box with
letters from his brother who is in prison. Thus, Zakhar wants to escape from such an
innocent world, and ends up in an empty world of “worthless offices” and a half-drunk
wandering life, but he also does not find himself there. It is difficult for him to fill the void
that gradually fills him, and at the end of the story he “The next day I got a call from the
legion’s office. I told them that I would not go anywhere”, abandons his dream, realizing
that all this was not important, unnecessary [13–16].
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In the story “Carlson” throughout the entire story, the hero’s terrible loneliness and
mental fatigue are conveyed: “That spring I quit my pub, where I worked as a bouncer.
Tenderness for the world overwhelmed me so much that I decided to get a job in a foreign
legion, as a mercenary. I had to somehow calm myself, in any way. Without a doubt, this
“tenderness for the world” expressed in the hero‘s anger and loneliness. His selfishness
comes largely not from selfishness, but from the surrounding spiritual emptiness and inner
spiritual emptiness, which he gradually tries to fill with reading, now drinking, now
fighting. From the first lines of the work, we learn that his property is a small box with
letters from his brother who is in prison. Thus, Zakhar wants to escape from such an
innocent world, and ends up in an empty world of “worthless offices” and a half-drunk
wandering life, but he also does not find himself there. It is difficult for him to fill the void
that gradually fills him, and at the end of the story he “The next day I got a call from the
legion’s office. I told them that I would not go anywhere”, abandons his dream, realizing
that all this was not important, unnecessary [17–20].
In the story “Wheels” – “loneliness”, “emptiness”, “melancholy”, “hopelessness” – is
the “circle of life” of the protagonist, his inability to go beyond this circle, to break it does
– this is the main idea of the story. The fact that the hero does not have a name is a sign of
the generalization of the image, in other words, it is a typical modern hero [21–25].
Depersonalization of personality, inability to act, and moral inaction are the characteristic
features of the infantile hero. It should be noted that all the elements of the composition,
built in such a way as to most prominently reveal the nature of the hero. Therefore, the
author very successfully uses the color painting “black wheels”, the sound painting “the
noise of the train wheels”, as well as the season – the end of autumn and the beginning of
winter as a time of wilting, death, total loneliness and emptiness.
The hero constantly feels that he is facing an abyss to hell, sometimes he loses his
human face, but at the same time, he does not dissolve into meaningless existence: “Vova,
have you ever thought ... that every year ... do you experience the day of your death? –
I asked ... Vovka turns his head, not understanding a single word of mine”.
The main character is a degraded intellectual, inside of whom there is emptiness,
perhaps from disappointment, perhaps from losing a job or poverty, he overcome by
melancholy, blues. “... he quit writing poetry and never did it seriously again, quit one job,
I didn’t hit another, then, I say, they hit me on the claw, and I found myself in the grave”,
and he fills this void with alcohol: “The norm was three bottles per person. The three of us
were supposed to drink nine bottles by midnight or a little later”. Thus, the state of the
protagonist is the lowest dead center, a quagmire, and which draws him in more and more
“I have been drinking for the fourth month already. In addition, I have been doing it every
day ... Lying on the bed, gloomy, with a crushed head; I stroked my sofa with my hands and
noticed that I was lying without a sheet. Moreover, a blanket without a duvet cover.
“Pissing again ...””. Sometimes glimpses of the human make him feel, he is ashamed of his
actions in front of loved ones: “Squinting from evil, to spasms in the brain, shame, I recalled
how my mother and sister turned me over at night, pulling out a sheet from under me”.
Nevertheless, these pitiful actions of an infantile and weak-willed person reveal his nature
even more. Surrendering to chance, he gradually descends lower and lower. Lack of will,
self-loathing are the main features of his character [25-29].
At the junction, the work appears a railway, with a freight train going along it,
characterizes the motive of a search, a life path that has a terminal station. The main
character miraculously does not fall under the wheels of the train, but even such a contact
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with death does not make him feel anything but “hot, stuffy, frenzied emptiness”. Thus, the
main character’s lifestyle is a way of avoiding reality on the one hand and rejection of the
cruelty of the world on the other. One plot replaces another, the hero is drunk and joyful
when he finds something to eat, but despite this melancholy, a feeling of loneliness and
emptiness eats him up. At the end of the story, the hero goes home drunk and, crossing the
railway tracks, almost falls under a train. Lying at the very rails, he sees the “black shiny
wheels” rushing past, the hero tired of life is looking for death under the wheels of the
train, and the “Wheel” meanwhile, and everything rolls like life.
When analyzing another story, which has the same title with the collection “Sin” in
the image of the main character – Zakhar, two types coexist, one of them is Zakhar the
brother, and the other Zakhar is a teenager. In addition, we see that the first of these types
prevails over the second, and this proved by our above examples from the story. Also in
the story, there is a lot of descriptions of the localities of life of people and even where the
lovers go when they want to retire, hide from everyone: “For bridges” was the name for
those cozy meadows where village lovers left on motorcycles or left as a couple. In
addition, the plot of the slaughter of a pig plays a special role; curiosity and fear
simultaneously absorb Zakhara, with all this he talks about life and death through the
prism of the perception of a dead pig: anticipating the heat. It was hot in the hands, in the
heart, in the kidneys, in the lungs: Zakharka clearly saw his organs, and they looked the
same that smoked before his eyes a minute ago. And from the realization of his own warm,
moist animal life, Zakharka felt especially passionately and not at all painfully how his
heart was contracting, a real meat heart, pushing blood to his hands, to hot palms and to
his head, scalding his brain, and down to his stomach, where everything was ... proudly
from the realization of endless youth. “Further, the contrast increases and it seems to
Zakhar that all the inhabitants of the barnyard know what happened and they feel uneasy
about it, it hurts: “And seeing this head, even the chickens went a little crazy, and the
rooster walked around, and the goat looked out of the darkness with Jewish suffering
eyes”. It seemed to the main character: “that the pig wants to howl, is about to howl” and
this is the peculiarity of adolescence, where love and death coexist. The first is the feelings
of 17-year-old Zakhar for his cousins, and the second is the death of a pig”. Therefore, in
the story, the main character, Zakhar, revealed from a different angle, for example, a
relationship with a three-year-old nephew. Rodik shows our hero – loving, sweet, caring
“Zakharka fiddled with him, put him on his neck, and they wandered around, a tanned guy
and a white child with fluffy hair”. But the spirit of a child is still felt in him, although on
the other hand his love to his cousins proves the opposite, which manifests itself and
seethes in him, raging like a hurricane, especially to the eldest – Katya: “I didn’t get enough
sleep, closed my eyes, immediately seeing Katya, about Katya, Katino, Katina ...”. He
compares them all the time: “I fell behind a little, looked at the ankles, calves of the sisters,
saw Ksyusha’s frog, tanned legs and – through the sundress filled with sunlight – Katya’s
hips, only prettier after childbirth”, from this example it can be revealed that Zakhar is
more drawn to Katya. This can be understood so that Katya is much older than he is and
this attracts him (this is called gerontophilia in psychology – the attraction of young people
to older people), and Ksyusha is his age. Nevertheless, despite this, he controls his feelings:
“Zakharka took off his shorts and ran into the water so as not to see the sisters undress.
“I wouldn’t see them at all ...,” I thought cheerfully, untruthfully, and immediately turned
to their voices”.
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Thus, the heroes of Zakhar Prilepin continue the series of characters who emdiv
the Russian national character, emdiv the most characteristic features of the Russian
ethnos at a historical break – the desire for spiritual search, love of freedom, independence,
self-esteem, the right to self-determination and conscious choice (moral, life), extreme
maximalism.
However, some of the images of the writer in the collection of stories “Sin” personify
the most odious and pretentious features of the lost generation of the “noughties” and are
partly determined by the socio-political realities of the turn of the XX–XXI centuries.
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