• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.265-293
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• 2011

This study focused on the literary world of T. Tolstaya, a Russian writer who takes a crucial position in contemporary Russian literature, drawing upon the wrier's a couple of short stories. 'Youth' is a key motive encompassing all works of Tolstaya, so that it becomes the poetic keynote among her literary works. In order to examine such distinctions of the main characters' world awareness in their youth as shown in Tolstaya's literary works, Chapter 2 of this paper paid a special attention to the analyse of her representative works such as "Sitting on a Golden Terracing Stone" and "Meeting with a Bird", and expressed potential implications of youth with mimetic imagination for her. For Tolstaya, youth is perceived as a paradise but original imagination of youth gradually fades away in adult and ends up with a lost paradise. This is why Tolstaya uses poetic means based on nostalgia for youth like paradise and literary motto for recovery of imagination in youth. In this regard, this study particularly examined the retrospective prologue resisting the power of time as well as different fictional characters living in her own fantastic world. As a result, this study draws a conclusion that such longing and nostalgia for youth and lost paradise as delineated by Tolstaya through retrospective prologue and characters speak for an existential speculation that explores any profound implication of afflictions in reality of human life, rather than focusing on the painful reality of human life which consists of honest dialogues with realities like 'darkness' and 'pain.' In addition, this study, complying with Zolotonosov's ideas which deal with and define Tolstaya's literary works as a shabby and humble box invisibly containing a full wealth of precious jewels inside, sheds a new light on the writer's literary world.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.41
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• pp.415-442
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• 2015

Through the comparison of "Rendezvous with a Bird" with "Araby", there were found to be well-explained psychological causes of the boy's (Petya) behavior that closely discloses the concrete object of desperation and definitely confirmed the internal causes of heroes (vanity of the boys in "Araby" and "Rendezvous with bird"). Through the comparison of "Rendezvous with a Bird" with "A man in a boat" we also knew that Petya's indefinite fear of death was to some extent a sense of guilt. This study contains a full-scale review of Russian contemporary writer Tatyana Tolstaya's short story "Rendezvous with a Bird", which is one of the her earliest works. As many critics indicate, the works of Tatyana Tolstaya resonate with metaphor. "Rendezvous with a bird" plays an important role in understanding this metaphoric tendency. In order to understand the metaphoric tendency of her works we need our own reading strategy, and so we inquired into the grasp of the main motifs. Analysis of the main motifs can start from the understanding of meanings of the very figurative title 'Rendezvous with a Bird'. To understand the meanings of the title, we first of all analyzed the incidents of actual or figurative meetings with birds in this work, and through this we deduced two main motifs. We confirmed one main motif of 'desperation', which centers on the love of a young boy and woman. We confirmed the other motif as 'death', which developed into the rendezvous of the grandfather with inevitable death. Thus, the 'desperation' and 'death' with which we meet in childhood becomes a subject matter for the writer. To understand the deeper meanings of these main motifs, we compared "Rendezvous with Bird" with the short story "Araby" by James Joyce and with the short story "A man in a boat" by Eyvind Johnson, which very successfully deal with the motifs: 'desperation' and 'death'.