Overcoming blindness and the music of memory: common motives in the stories by Wang Meng, V. Shukshin, and K. Paustovsky

The article examines the system of echoing motives in the stories by Russian writers V. Shukshin «The Sun, the Old Man and the Girl» (1963) and K. Paustovsky «The Old Cook» (1940), and the Chinese writer Wang Meng «Listening to the Sea» (1982), where the central place in the artistic space is taken by a steady dyad of characters based on gender and age antinomy: a blind old man and a young girl. The author of the article examines the story of Wang Meng «Listening to the Sea» in the motive context of the Russian literature of the mid-20th century, which allows to emphasize new meanings in it and to identify artistic universals that create a multi-dimensional, multi-level space of the text. The influence of foreign literature on Van Meng’s style acts as a communicative mechanism without which the writer's creative evolution is impossible. The article highlights many motive and image echoes that are significant to the writers' artistic world: the archetype of the wise old man, whose universal characteristics are embodied by the heroes of all three stories with various degrees of «purity»; motives of blindness, insight and epiphany, the motive of symbolic overcoming blindness through music and memory, the motives of silence and death. The article concludes that the actualization of the intertextual ties in Van Meng's story allows us to read it as an artistic representation of the key uni-versals of the XX century culture, as a work about blindness and epiphany, about death and rebirth, about eternity and omnipotence of art, about the resurrecting theurgical power of memory, and in this sense, the story becomes a kind of «genetic dossier», where the principles of the «letter of memory» in the later Van Meng’s works are formed. These prin-ciples were most forcefully expressed in his famous novel «Metamorphoses, or a Game of Folding Pictures» which al-lows to consider working with memory, including cultural memory, as an integral basis of Van Meng’s work, helping to put together the disconnected images of the past into a coherent picture of «memory elision».