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KONSTANTIN SLUCHEVSKY (1837–1904)

If Maximov as journalist described the way of life of the Russian northerners – the Pomor’s, theirs customs, jobs, especially fishery, their home life, their families, a famous Russian poet Sluchevsky created the model of the mythological space of the Kola North in the collection of the poems “Murman’s echoes”. He was a nobleman who had got education in France and Germany, the Doctor of Philosophy. In 1885 he visited the Kola Peninsula on a cruiser “Zabiyaka” (“Squabbler”), the Tersky and the Murman’s coasts.

The poet was amazed at great scales of the northern space. He exclaims: “What a great sizes are there!” Habitual measurements are not suitable for the description of granite lumps which are erected by a great walls. He strengthened epithets, comparisons, includes archaic lexicon to transfer stately scope of sea depths, contrasts of day and night, heat and cold, stones and trees.

Sluchevsky finds a poetic image – a myth. In his imagination, the Kola North is a wild elementary world in which the Demiurge starts to search for prototypes and forms of the future Universe. As though the Founder was not assured yet of the intentions, He, playing weights and spaces”, gave to the rocks the shape of magic palaces, sent the form of persons to the reflections, threw midway the deformed layers, scattered shine on shallows and brilliant sea stones”. Sluchevsky couldn’t find an analogy seen on the Kola North in the previous impressions (travel across the Alps). He recognized that northern world is unique also, there is possible to compare it only with antique theogony, creating of the Universe. The heaps of rocks and stones have reminded him of the ancient epic, or a drama. The play of the whales looked as the fight of titans and giants. The majestic statics of granite rocks, the sky and the sea – as an eternal frame of life, movement of born and changing forms forced the poet to think of life and death.

According to Sluchevsky, the person living in the North is a part of a poetic myth. Following the tradition of the Russian literature, the poet appeals for compassion for the Pomors, who live and work under severe northern conditions. However, this intonation appears false because the Pomors are live and joyful. Sluchevsky studies a life circle of the Russian northerners and expresses the admiration of their energy and the creative work, especially of the beautiful cities on the shore of the cold see. “When coming here, you will meet cities that can be described only by a fairy tale”. He is surprised at the beauty of the ancient Kola-city, poet admires women there. They are attractive, smart, healthy, strong. They run not only their home, but the city, they go fishing with their husbands and defend homeland from invaders.

Sluchevsky asks a philosophical question: how does the Russian person succeed in survival in the conditions of icy winds and a terrible cold, on the edge of the world, “where the Lord has connected the border of the native land with the border of the Creation”. The answer is that the following: the person is

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cleared of vanity and vices of a civilization in the northern world, he is before the eyes of the God here, – where the God manifests himself in Nature.

Sluchevsky creates the spiritual Universe, where the natural environment is shown as congenial to the God and the Man. The poet uses the concepts of theogony, antic drama and epic, fairy tale, life and death, the God and the Man, when he represents the image of the Kola North. Sluchevsky enlarges his vision of life, and his poetic voice and becomes a painter depicting granite architecture of huge space, palette of northern paints, “dense blue of horizon, dark emerald of a wave, violet shades of the midnight sun”. He is undoubtedly a pantheist, and in one of the best poems represents the universal sense of the Northern world: “Here eternity in an aura of severe beauty has laid down for the rest and breathes on the open space”.

MIKHAIL PRISHVIN (1873–1954)

Michael Prishvin – the remarkable Russian writer – has visited the Kola North, or so-called Russian Lapland, twice, in 1907 and in 1933. He passed through the Kola Peninsula, lived in the Lappish settlement in the tundra, fished with the Pomors. The North fascinated him, and in 1908 he published the book of stories and northern impressions “Following the Magic Kolobok”. The Kolobok – is an artful character of a Russian fairy tale, the round roll, that avoids and escapes from people and animals into the wood. This image isn’t casual for the author, who is led by some fantastic force towards a mysterious adventures. “The book of Prishvin has special lyrical intonation, poetic mood in the description of the fantastic landscapes of the North and the touching relation to the natives of tundra. Readers are attracted by cheerful tone, optimism, novelty of art style”, – writes professor Panteleeva about this book.

As well as Jack London does, the writer feels uniqueness, mysteriousness of the Northern Nature: “The bright transparency and silence”, “transparent easy weightless water, cold as ice”, “day not real, but crystal”, “mysterious sunny night”, “the sun sparkling too brightly, but cold and sharply”. The writer marks clearness of lines, freshness of paints, cold – almost cosmic – light of the northern world. Lyrical hero of Prishvin, as well as the hero of Sluchevsky, observes changes of natural forms, when vast spaces of rocks reminds the silent hardened ocean, and ocean looks like solid glass.

The illusion and a reality mix up in his book, the author’s imagination draws the fantastic world: “Possibly such day was after the Flood, when water has only started to leave. The water fills all sinful earth... Our ark slides in silence. The feeling of unreality is born from the perception of the bright transparency and silence... The time of magic images in the country of the midnight sun approaches. What I see now – all is a dream. Animals have come out of woods, fishes from the water. Moon has leaned on a birch. Strings of kantele have rung

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out. Man has started singing. He sang affairs of times past, sang things creation… “The traveler feels that the time has stopped, and he comes back in the past. Lapps can’t name neither month, nor year. Only smile guilty. Don't know.

Time stops”.

The central symbol in the Northern stories of London is the image of the White Silence, it is congenial to the white nights in Prishvin’s book, one of the chapters names as “Sunni nights”. Bewitched by the white nights, the writer creates a fantastic image of the Russian Lapland, where “unprecedented flowers, animals, birds are clever and kind”. Northern birches remind him of apple-trees, moss-grown stones – of gravestones. The sun which does not set in summer, destroys time, gives a filling of continuity of life. In the short term of a northern summer the Nature hurries all cycles of development up. Nature flourishes all the polar day and night long, the tireless sun breaks all the usual rhythms of human life, the author confuses day and night and feels “excessively emotional and tired”. The dead silence, emptiness, beauty of the Nature – all grieves the hero to think of great sense of human life. “If there was the huge person who would rise, has lit desert up, but we were weak insignificant lumps at the bottom of the rocks. And such longing was in the nature for the huge person!” Lapps – are the fantastic heroes of the mysterious northern world, “the tribe forgotten by the cultural world”. Prishvin spends a lot of time with them, repeats words of Lappish language, listens to legends, learns customs. The author is surprised, how these small, naive, fun-loving people live harmoniously under severe conditions of the North.

SAMI LEGENDS

There are many stone sculptures created by the nature on the shore of the Imandra Lake. A walrus, the seal put out from the water, the big black whale stretched here. “The whale-stone”, Lapp says. – Fathers speaks that he is a wizard. Near the Imandra two wizards once argued. One of them asks another, if he can transform himself to an animal. The other answers, that he can’t become an animal but he will dive as a whale and nobody won’t see him, he will run off the wood. He dives into the water, can’t reach coast a little and show a back. The wizard in the shore sees him, shouts, and the first wizard hardens.

Some people hardened near the Kola bay. A Witch dragged an island through the ocean, wanted to lock up Kola bay. And someone saw and shouted. The island stopped, the witch hardened, and all people in the village hardened too. The island was called Kildin.

However, the real northerners for Prishvin are the Pomors. The Pomors are considered as the essence of the Russian nation. “It is a unique corner of

Russia known to me, where people are proud of the native land”. A Pomor writes a letter to an imperial official about life in the North: “Our region is rich,

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the best northern region because all northern riches aren’t touched. “The Pomors live with passion, risk fishing in the rough sea, work with enjoyment, fight to death.

Describing the Russian North, Prishvin unites real and fantastic lines. It is interesting to notice that fantastic and mystical images are caused by forms of the northern country, a palette of northern paints, dead silence, the white nights, powerful rhythms of natural life. The Lapps keep the most ancient forms of life and legends. The Pomors for Prishvin are the embodiment of the national character and the basement of the Russian life

§ 3. The processes of globalization and identification in the North as they reflect in the modern literature of Norway and Russia

We don’t reflect all the processes, which are characteristic for the Northern Russian and Norwegian literatures. Among contemporary writers of Norway we choose the novels of Erlend Loe, in which he has described inner world of a modern Norwegian, Hanne Ørstavik writes about globalization impact on life of small settlements in Finnmark and well-known “The Dina’s book” of Herbjørg Wassmø as a description of historical source of the Norwegian identity.

Globalization processes assume the general standards, rejecting of the basic national and cultural values. The Cultural type of identity is defined by some common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by subjective self-identification of people. But people “can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and shapes of civilizations change over time… In a “very fluid world” people are seeking identity andas a consequence-security. But in times of rapid social change (it may be globalization) long-standing sources of identity and systems of authority are disrupted, “established identities dissolve, the self must be redefined, and new identities created” (Hantington S.I. The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the World Order).

HANNE ØRSTAVIK

The novel “Love” expresses the author’s opinion about the loss of the long-standing Norwegian traditions, about destruction of a model of behavior and system of archetypes which underlies the national Norwegian character. No wander, the word “love” exists only in the novel title and never uses again. Globalization and transgression are the principal causes of the destruction of traditional values, as Ørstavik thinks. At the heart of a plot – one day of life of a small family of mother and the son, Vibeke and Une, who is 8 years old. The main personages are in the center of the big world, which includes not only

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small town in the North of the Norway, but also the great space of the nature, the historical and mythological past. Mythological background is important for understanding of the globalization processes, where traditional values are lost by the modern person. The Author draws a winter landscape traditional for the Norwegian literature, very frosty day, the stiffened wood, snow road in which cars stick, – all details are full of philosophical sense, reminding us of the eternal conflict between person and severe space. Vibeke, an expert of the local department of culture, looks out in the window and sees, how lanterns shine the road between two lines of houses, further high-speed highway, further an administration building, shops, the similar houses – monotonous architectural shape. And outside a huge wall of the forest. There are still library, hospital, school, church, the sports complex, mobile park of entertainments here, twenty minutes by highway, and you are in the city with cafes, restaurants. This is a small model of civilization, the same in any corner of the global world. The writer represents standards of the consumer society, which purpose is to make people seek for comfort. She numbers the conveniences – cars, snowmobiles, mobile phones, TVs., the same meal – of sausage, sandwiches, cookies; the unified life destroys traditions and customs of national life. The Man has surrounded himself with comfort, he has lost vital energy necessary for a survival in severe conditions of the North, and therefore has lost his national character and identity. Basic values of the Norwegian culture become only a fashion, a decor. The Norwegian world loses the unique lines: heroes listen to the Indian music, curtains at windows remind “a fire in jungle”, jazz sounds everywhere, Vibeke herself has black hair and, as an Indian, carries piercing in a nose.

The main symbol of the novel becomes the mobile park of entertainments with attractions instead of real life: a roundabout, virtual computer games, lotteries. Some kind of a false holiday. Vibeke buys lottery tickets without a prize. Unlike Ibsen’s and Hamsun heroes, the characters of Orstavik’s novel lose their communications with national circle of life. It is not surprising that the theme of destruction of human relations is the main in the plot. The son of Vibeke leaves keys at home and wait on a frost for a mother on the eve of his birthday, while she has a good time in a city with a new acquaintance. The boy freezes and dies.

The consumer society which has created the convenient and safe world, suppresses natural instincts of a person, an instinct of self-preservation, a continuation of the family, natural selection and even a parent instinct. All heroes of the novel lose skills of dialogue, moral standards, etiquette. They are lonely.

Une, when visiting a friend, is silent, they listen to the Chinese music, the girl falls asleep, and her parents release the eight-year boy at frosty night to go home. The Woman who was bringing up the boy by the car, treats him with cigarette, and the mother of the boy doesn’t remember about him in an overflowed cafe. An old neighbor doesn’t leave the house in a frost, the social service provider has arrived to him, has thrown a package at the open door, not even muf-

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fling the motor of his car. It seems to us, that Vibeke loves her son, however Une irritates her, all his jokes are silly to her.

The Writer goes deep into the process of the loss by Norwegians of their national consciousness. She considers that in a free society the person doesn’t need a moral imperative, which is the main line of the Norwegian character connected with Protestantism (we will remember Brand from Ibsen’s drama). Being divorced, Vibeke does not want to connect herself with some new bonds. A man, attractive as a Viking (it’s some kind of irony), who is pleasant to her, prefers easy relations, he is lazy, wanders across Norway with the park of entertainments without any goal. A modern Norwegian woman is educated, emancipated, free and unfortunately lonely. The Writer creates the Shadow of the heroine – some kind of hermaphrodite looks like the Death in the films.

As the contrast to Vibeke, the author concentrates her attention on the inner world of Une, who loves mother, wants to defend her from all dangers. He dreams of real home, but will never get it.

Two images underline the author’s thought about the man living in the global world. One of them is the car in which the person is fenced off the world and remains lonely. And the other image is connected with the dream of the boy to go by train in a long trip with his mother: “We will admire cities and mountains, and the seas behind a window, will talk with travelers from different countries and never arrive anywhere”. The global world probably exists to unite people and to remind them of eternal value of life – about love.

ERLEND LOE

Erlend Loe’s best work concerns a critical examination of a new direction taken by the Norwegian society. Loe’s early novels established him as a representative voice of educated person of his generation. He maintained popularity with the novel “Naiv. Super” (1996). Loe is a post-modernist writer, but he never leaves the reader any doubt that he is a Norwegian. As he thinks, the processes of globalization are fatal for a young generation by loss of identity and human values at all.

It is important to the writer to create the Norwegian natural context as accompaniment to the events described. He compares the “Norwegian” and “American” chapters of the novel. The titles of the Norwegians’ are: a Tree, Time, Life, Wood, Animals, a Bird, a Board. The hero remembers a cod, a haddock, an elk, a polar bear. In the “American chapters” the city environment is reflected.

The main hero has lost the sense of the life and the interest for it. He is assured of “senselessness of the existing world”. He left university and apartment, refused the accepted standards and thought of a new system of values. The writ-

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er represents complication of the modern young Norwegian’s identification in the global world.

The hero creates his own personality anew. He comes back into the childhood, buys toys, remembers favorite things and employments. He creates oppositions: a good friend and a bad friend. He tries to unite his life with the Space and the Time.

When he leaves Norway for New York, he gets to the center of a global civilization and understands that people are the same everywhere. As a normal Norwegian, he returns to the elemental and eternal values of life: family and love.

Summing up his experience, the hero speaks: “Life is a travel, and maybe, I am a real balanced person”.

“Doppler” (2004) is a novel with a philosophical tendency and the theme of the individual and national identification. Loe changes the hero, the ways of his identification and its results, but he keeps humorous and ironical intonation. The new hero – Doppler – belongs to a middle class, he is near forty years old, he has a family, he is a successful person and a so-called “average Norwegian”. Doppler gives up his family and profitable work and leaves them to live in the wood.

The hero rejects all standard values of a consumer society and the civilization blessings. He wishes to live in the consensus with himself and with the Nature. The Nature gives him a sense of the life, and harmony. His predecessors become the writers, the saints, and the heroes of the world literature: Francis of Assizes, Swift and his Gulliver, Defoe and Robinson Crusoe, Russo and his appeal “back in the Nature”, Kipling and his Mawgli, the Americans Henry Toro, London, Burrows and Tarzan and many others, however the writer is interested by the national Norwegian variant.

Doppler doesn’t love modern people, occupied with earning money and maintenance of their status. He preaches at school by the words of Saint Francis:

“It is necessary to teach youth to exchange things and services, instead of buying them. The future of the Earth depends on it. Contrary to popular belief, the person doesn’t own the earth and the world. Flowers are our sisters, and horses, eagles, without speaking about elks, are our brothers. And how the person can buy and sell something? Who possesses warmth of air and the wind rustle in foliage? Juice wandering in the trees bears memory of those who has lived before us. In stream murmur you can hear the voice of my father, and his father, and so on...”

Creation of Totem, some kind of a monument to the father, which reflects a continuation of the family, becomes Doppler’s basic employment.

The narrator of the story is Doppler himself, but the author appears with ironical intonation, characterizing the hero. Doppler, a man of middle age, dirty and shaggy, spends his time with the baby-elk in the wood. He has deserted a family, two children, the pregnant wife, but readers don’t feel indignation to him, thanks to his children’s naivety. He is very strange, but Norwegian.

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From the author’s point of view on Doppler, he is an embodiment of the national character in the global world. No wonder, he likes snow, winter, skiing as traditional heroes of Norwegian literature do. But he doesn’t love modern Norwegian customs, especially “ability of pleasant living”, “thanks to what we are the big eaters and the most selfish nation all over the world”. “He doesn’t respect the country where the small population lives at the expense of billions oil money and of natural resources”. He considers that “the Norwegians stand apart from the world and don’t know real life”. Doppler searches for “other people and reasonable life”. And many other Norwegians follow Doppler living in wood. He can’t escape from his own nature and an ethnic identity. Thus, he also will go with baby-elk (a symbol of Norway) till an old age. The irony of the author is obvious.

Creating the context of the novel, Loe concentrates attention on the Norwegian writers. Doppler repeats the mistakes of Ibsen’s Nora and Peer Gynt, he is some kind of pantheist, as Lieutenant Glahn. He searches for freedom from a society in the wood, coming back to the nature, and heroes of Ibsen’s drama “The Wild Duck” created artificial wood on an attic, both Doppler and appeared are doomed to a failure. He is a real Norwegian in the global world.

V. BELOV, V. MASLOV

The modern Russian fiction about the North and, in particular, about the Kola North is various and of high literary merit. It has a wide circle of themes such as: preservation of northern countryside, reflection on the small native land, keeping Russian northern identity and influence of modern civilization on the traditional Pomor culture. Northern literature expresses keen interest in the problems of the good and the evil.

Vasily Belov (1932) lives in the small village near Vologda, he describes life, language, traditions of Russian peasants.

His novels and stories were awarded with many literary prizes. His book “Lad” (“The Circle of Life”) – is a collection of articles on the northern Russian tradition and culture, their esthetics and ethics, the life in the North. The cycle of life is the symbol of the harmony, the consent and the beauty. The life circle submits to a rhythm which is formed by centuries, and its destruction is dangerous to the northern people. Environmental conditions, work on the earth, everyday life and holidays – everything has its influence on the Russian national character. When creating this book Belov uses memoirs of mother and relatives. For example:

Rhythm. Life of my ancestors, northern Russian peasants was rhythmical. Any destruction of a rhythm – war, illness, a poor harvest – was taken as a catastrophe for all. Disasters in home life, like illness, death, a fire, adultery, theft,

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arrest of a member of a family, death of a horse – destroyed both a family and village life.

Native nest and the nature. In the native home, the fire and the place of honor (icons and icon lamps) – were the center of economic life. This world gradually extended: a log hut, then manor, a field, a meadow, a wood. In backwoods special traces of human life became very important: a footpath, a stone in a stream, fire wood. In the wood the person searched for solitude to think of life, but there was also the work in the forest (heavy – to clear away wood for an arable land, easy – to pick mushrooms and berries).

Vitaly Maslov (1936–2001) was born in a small village Syomzha near Arkhangelsk, after the graduating of seaworthy school he worked as a chief of radio station of nuclear ice breaker “Lenin” more than 20 years. Maslov is the author of stories and the novels describing the life of the northern Pomor villages. For him, the Pomor village keeps social, national and moral traditions. The civilization destroys life circle of the Pomors, their traditions, the northern nature, people lose communication with the earth and the small native land. His heroes try to revive the dying villages, to keep the moral bases of life. Maslov’s books are filled with passionate and lyrical feelings, as the writer personally worries of the loss of national culture, of Pomors’ way of life.

In Maslov’s novel “Krugovaya poruka”, in the collection of the stories

“Krutaya Dresva” the life of Mezen – one of the modern central Pomors’ settlements – is described. In the story “The Wedding”, the Pomors come on wedding to native village Krutaya Dresva which doesn’t exist any more on a map, as the administration considers it unprofitable. Men, – captains, fishermen, navigators, naval officers, inhabitants of big cities now, – remember the history of the small native land with pride, and decide to restore the destroyed economy. However, to return to the past is already impossible. Many of them have families and work in the cities. Small villages are economically unprofitable. Relatives and the friends who have gathered for wedding, reflect not only on destruction of traditions, but also on a tragic sense of modern civilization.

CONCLUSION

The perception of the North changes in time and space, some stereotypes collapse, new images and senses are born. In our opinion, the literature reflects the image of the North in the unity of its complicated and changing components, including geopolitical, social, ethnocultural, philosophical, psychological and aesthetic understanding of the Northland. Literature represents the North as a universal model of the world with its constant characteristics of Space, Nature, People and their Civilization and Mythology.

The poetic representation of the North has an ancient tradition. Its basement is in Icelandic sagas which depict us harsh landscapes of the Arctic North and courageous Vikings. The basic characteristics of the North in the sagas are:

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Time, Space, austere landscapes. The Sagas’ main heroes – Vikings – as historian A. Gurevich believed, “kept the universal examples of human behavior, requirement of morality, belief in destiny, which was considered as the main force ruling the world, life and human beings”.

On a boundary of the 19–20th centuries the interest to the North anew appeared in the world literature.

Disappointments in life are typical for European decadence in general. On the other hand, many writers aspired to represent heroic and positive basis in human being. Feelings of the end of civilization induced them to return to eternal sources of human life, to its natural principles, which could remain in the North. The Northern theme became popular thanks to the Norwegian, American and Russian writers’ works: Henrik Ibsen’s dramas, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset; the books of Sergey Maximov, Konstantin Sluchevsky and Michael Prishvin, a cycle of Northern stories by Jack London. The main idea connecting these artists together concerned the problem of the relation between Man, Nature and Civilization.

For the Norwegian writers the severe and grand image of the North correlates with the main principles of the national character and self-identification of the people: a strong will, powerful character, moral values, and even romantic impulses and emotions. For Jack London the North is both as the physical realm and the metaphysical absolute, constant struggle in Nature and “survival of the fittest”. The Russian writers consider the North as the treasury of the Nature, and the Pomors – as the embodiment of the national character and the basement for the real Russian life.

Globalization processes assume the general standards, rejecting of the basic national and cultural values. On the contrary, the literature of the 21st century describing a “very fluid world” makes an accent on the idea that people keep biological identity and seek for the cultural identity as a means against selfdestruction.

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