Russia under Peter the Great as a civilizational and cultural borderland in E. Rutherfurd’s novel “Russka”

   The paper studies the specificity of imagological representation in the novel Russka by E. Rutherfurd, a contemporary British writer. In this large-scale narration about the history of Russia, the authors single out the chapter devoted to the epoch of Peter the Great for a close study. The research shows how E. Rutherfurd reconsiders some stereotypes about Russia (Russian Asianism, barbarism, etc.), representing the country as a borderland where ambivalent civilizational and cultural tendencies and phenomena collide. In the novel, the national image construction is in accord with the views of the Russian philosopher G. D. Gachev who stressed primarily the geographical position of Russia, situated in the gravitational field between the East and the West. He also highlights the natural phenomenon, the wind, which performs a symbolic function in the novel, reflecting permanent interactions of contradictory tendencies in Russian reality. The ambivalence of the Russian chronotope is exposed in the novel through the private and social history collisions caused by the reforms of Peter the Great. The phenomenon of transition, in particular, is exemplified by the fate of Prokopii who experiences a crisis of self-identification as a result of the destruction of the Russian world-outlook sacral base. In the novel, the motif of borderland is rendered through the juxtaposition of topoi, cultural traditions, the images of Moscow and St Petersburg and, finally, through the image of Peter the Great, portrayed in the context of both apologetic and demythologizing traditions.

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