Literary Space as a Means of Historical Representation in Contemporary British and Belarusian Fiction

Artistic concepts of space in contemporary fiction remain one of the most important tools for explaining, evaluating, and interpreting a particular historical period. This article focuses on the comparative study of the functions of spatial images in the works of modern Belarusian and British writers: H. Mantel, P. Ackroyd, J. Crace, A. Miller, A. Arkush, L. Rublevskaya, V. Orlov, etc. The aim of the study is to identify various aspects, functions, and characteristics of literary landscapes in historical fiction and determine which of them are universal, and which are unique for authors from different countries. Based on the principles of the comparative method and the method of hermeneutic analysis, the author identifies and interprets universal spatial imagery of a house, ruins, a church, a gate, a bridge, and other significant landscape symbols. Also, she analyses the metaphor of the palimpsest in the diachronic aspect. The significance of literary visions of space in historical fiction is determined by its primary connection with the notions of culture and identity. More particularly, it is the strong historical associations that turn the national landscape into an element of cultural heritage, a repository of collective memory. This feature manifests itself in the motifs of return to the parental home (as a way of the character’s spiritual rebirth); unsuccessful restoration and architectural monstrosity as an expression of the loss of cultural codes of the past; mapping as a revolt against chaos; a revived murderous statue as a repressed, “haunting” history and its destructive influence on modern society. The perception of the physical landscape as a material form of the past determines its axiological potential. As a result, the images of Victorian architecture are used as symbols of lost greatness (P. Ackroyd, S. Waters, A. Byatt), and the images of modern (Soviet in Belarusian texts) buildings reflect the ontological emptiness and failure of the twentieth-century ideologies. The models of literary space in the texts analysed point to the perception of the historical process as a history of regress and degradation.