Between Pan and the Gray Wolf: Dionysian Variations

Mariam Petrosyan’s novel “The House in which ...” uses a model of two worlds and involves several teenage trickster heroes who can go into another reality called “The Forest”, as well as take other children there. The paradigm for such a plot structure in European literature aimed at children and adolescents is D. Barry’s book “Peter Pan”. Her hero is correlated with a pagan Pan, and he takes boys from ordinary families to his island. Peter Pan does not want to grow up and does not know love; the children he takes away must be cheerful and heartless. The immobile time on Peter Pan Island and the lack of love there contrast this world with Christian culture, but they bring it closer to the pagan – Dionysian world, in the words of F. Nietzsche. This construction proved to be very fruitful in the European mass literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. However, in Mariam Petrosyan’s novel, in contrast to this literature, the images of tricksters are not cultivated. They preserve and show the werewolf, dark, dangerous nature. This interpretation of the trickster is connected with the specifics of the Russian literary tradition. Since the time of Romanticism, which established the model of two worlds, the other world in this tradition was usually presented as hostile to man. In the modern era, the two-world model has regained its validity. This was largely due to the fact that the aesthetics of Russian modernism adopted the Nietzschean concept of Dionysianism, specifically interpreted as an appeal to soil culture. However, on the part of traditionally thinking writers, such pochvennichestvo met with rejection. He was criticized by Ivan Bunin, in the story “Sukhodol”, contrasting Christianity with him as the only mechanism for preserving cultural memory. In the 21st century, in the stories of Elena Chizhova, Irina Bogatyreva, Evgenia Nekrasova, the model of two worlds with an appeal to soil culture was again actualized. The characters of the other world were depicted in them as assistants to the heroes, but at the same time unsafe and alien creatures. This interpretation of the trickster is close to the image of a magical assistant in a fairy tale. It was she who was realized in the novel by Mariam Petrosyan.