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- Tournier, Michel / Le roi des aulnes (1)
Many critics have pointed out the importance of revelation by John of Patmos as an intertext in Michel Tournier's "Le roi des aulnes" [...]. They normally refer to the apocalyptic ending of the novel as the most obvious link with the Johannine text. This connection is obvious not only because the final scene is the destruction of Kaltenborn castle with all its inhabitants (and by extension the destruction of the entire Third Reich), but also because there are direct references to revelation in Tournier's text [...]. However, the importance of Johannine discourse goes well beyond this overt intertextuality.
Ten years after writing "Spotted dog running along the seashore" ("Пегий пес, бегущий краем моря") Chingiz Aitmatov said that this novella was his favorite. Perhaps this is because it represents the essence of Aitmatov's artistic world view. The term "essence" is appropriate here because the setting and the characters of the novella are totally removed from the modem world and from history itself. Unburdened by the need to relate his artistic goals and philosophical interests to any specific socio-political context - a requirement made all the more problematic for an author writing within the Soviet literary system - Aitmatov was free to develop his favorite themes in a kind of "tabula rasa" medium. Thus, it was with absolute directness that the author could face questions dominating much of his fiction: the moral soundness of age-old values, the need for continuity in social development, the necessity of humanity's hannonious coexistence with nature, and the positive ethical value of myth.
In his lifetime Daniil Charms only succeeded in publishing two of his poems for adults. Publicly he was a children's author: a job in the Soviet Union which traditionally attracted many writers whose literature for adults was either rejected by the official literary system or had to be hidden altogether if its creators wanted to avoid trouble.
In fact up to the present day it is still Charms the children's author who is best known and loved, although finally under new historical and political conditions the writer for adults has also been allowed to make his debut. However, whatever he wrote, Charms' work was always dominated by an absurdist world view, a view that usually denied all dogma or ideology. His only aim seems to have been to present a world upside down and play around with literary and other conventions, i.e. more than anything else he wanted to be different, acting as a sort of literary "punk".
Although Charms and his associates were preceded by European absurdist authors, such as A. Jarry (1873-1907), it is very difficult to establish any relationship of influence between examples of Western European absurdism and Daniil Charms. Nonetheless, Charms' work, as well as that of Jarry, Ionesco and Beckett, all share the "grotesquely comic as well as irrational" (Abrams 1981: 1) quality of the absurdist movement in its larger modernist context.