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Interpretation features of Scheherazade’s tales in B. Beaulieu and D. Mermoux’s graphic novel “A Thousand and One Lives in the Emergency”

https://doi.org/10.26907/2782-4756-2025-81-3-163-169

Abstract

For the first time in Russian literary studies, this article analyzes the graphic novel “A Thousand and One Lives in the Emergency” (Les mille et une vies des urgences, 2017) written by French authors Baptiste Beaulieu and Dominique Mermoux. We analyze the work from the point of view of its comparison with the ancient literary monument of Arabic and Persian literature “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights”. The aim of the work is to identify parallels between medieval and modern works. The relevance of the study is its appeal to the genre of the graphic novel, which is a controversial phenomenon in contemporary philological science. This genre, synthesizing verbal and visual principles, allows the authors not only to visually (literally – in the form of a drawing) present the transformation of medieval images and the space-time structure, but also to represent the creation of their own new Universe (the emergency department – as a separate world) based on the world of the ancient Scheherazade’s Tales. The study uses the historical-literary, comparative-contrastive and structural methods. We analyze the system of characters, in particular the central images of the auto-hero Baptiste Beaulieu and his terminally ill patient Firebird, establishing their parallels with the characters in the collection of the Arabian fairy tales. The character of Baptiste Beaulieu appears as a modern Scheherazade who is telling her tales in order to be able to prolong his patient’s life. In the case of this graphic novel, life is prolonged not for the central character – the intern doctor, but for the recipient of his “clinical tales” – the female character diagnosed with cancer. The spatial-temporal organization of the work allows us to conclude that the reality of the hospital is deliberately mythologized; here, the process of storytelling extends Firebird’s lifespan and pushes back the moment of her death. The article concludes that the authors of the graphic novel, choosing “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights” as a basis, emphasize the motif of healing the human soul through its interaction with artistic words. The creative act (storytelling) helps the characters overcome death, since the genre of the fairy tale assumes the transfer of experience from generation to generation.

About the Author

I. G. Prudius
Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University named after V. P. Astafyev
Russian Federation

Prudius Irina Gennadievna, Ph.D. in Philology, Associate Professor,

89 Lebedeva Str., Krasnoyarsk, 660049



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Review

For citations:


Prudius I.G. Interpretation features of Scheherazade’s tales in B. Beaulieu and D. Mermoux’s graphic novel “A Thousand and One Lives in the Emergency”. Philology and Culture. 2025;(3):163-169. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.26907/2782-4756-2025-81-3-163-169

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