Этнотипы литовско-польско-немецкого пограничья в повести Максима Горецкого На империалистической войне

Abstract

Ethnotypes of the Lithuanian-Polish-German Borderland in Maksim Haretski’s Novella On the Imperialist War

The aim of the work Ethnotypes of the Lithuanian-Polish-German borderland in the novella “On the Imperialist War” by Maksim Haretski is to conduct an imagological analysis of the ethnotypes present in the work. In order to achieve it, it seems necessary to solve the following tasks:

• to identify the main artistic images that reveal the features of ethnic stereotypes;

• to identify the most important qualities assigned by the author to the collective images of various peoples;

• to compare ethnotypes in terms of their structural heterogeneity generated by the situation of cultural boundaries at the break of major historical epochs.

The methodology of the research is imagology in the version of the “Dutch school” (Joep Leerssen); some approaches of the “Aachen programme on imagology” (Hugo Dyserinck) are used. The setting of Maksim Haretski’s novella On the Imperialist War is the Lithuanian-Polish-German borderland at the junction of the German and Russian empires in 1914. In it, the author creates a whole gallery of ethnotypes of various peoples, revealing a connection with ethnic stereotypes present in Belarusian culture. Stereotypical images of representatives of the most numerous European peoples – Russians, Germans, Poles – are divided into a number of subtypes and ethnotypes of an intermediate and diffi cult-to-identify character. The self-image of the Belarusian reveals both sublime-romantic and reduced-naturalistic components. The comparison of the Belarusian ethnotype with others does not always take the form of their clear opposition to each other. At the same time, the image of Belarus as a country turns out to be similar to that of Lithuania and contrary to that of Germany.