Genre and style originality of L. Gibadullina’s novel “Әлиф ләм мим” (“Alif lam mim”)

Abstract

The article analyzes the genre and stylistic originality of L. Gibadullina’s novel “Әлиф ләм мим” (“Alif Lam Mim”). The novel lacks a pronounced storyline. The choice of narrative events and the author’s reflection determine the intra-literary synthesis: the dramatic, lyrical, and prosaic aspects of the life story of the educators and enlighteners S. Vagizov and R. Valitova. The birth and death of the main character are the key structural components of the biographical prose. The protagonist’s life is presented in fragments. The motif of the family plays an important role in revealing the plotlines of the spouses. The real biography of the Tatar primer creators serves as a prototype for the story. The genre feature is revealed in the plot and compositional stability of the family image. We argue that this work is similar in form to a “small novel” characterized by understatement. The author uses “expansion” of the content by describing the life of the characters from the protagonists’ environment. An important role in expanding the content is played by the chronotope (real biographical time, the chronotope of the road, crisis, etc.). The author resorts to historical inversion, in which artistic thinking localizes the values of the Jadid era in the past and presents a gallery of national enlightened figures. The internal “compression” of the text in “Alif Lam Mim” manifests itself in the author’s deliberate pursuit of brevity, conciseness, and the multifunctional nature of the techniques used to create the fictional world of the work.