ON UNDERSTANDING THE CREATIVE CONCEPT OF HISTORY IN A POSTMODERNIST NOVEL (BASED ON GEORGIAN LITERATURE)

Abstract

The study of national literary life in relation to world literary processes represents one of the most pressing problems of contemporary literary studies. It was precisely this consideration that determined our choice - to discuss, through the prism of Western theorists' views, the peculiarities of presenting the artistic conception of history in the contemporary Georgian postmodernist novel. It is known that the problem of understanding the relationship between historical past and contemporaneity manifests itself with greater or lesser intensity in every literary epoch; in this regard, intensive discussion in Western scholarly circles was renewed from the last quarter of the 20th century, which, taking into account the processes occurring in literary life, the genre-modified forms of the historical novel and conceptually renewed stylistic features, is considered a new stage in Western scholarly space. Today, no one disputes that in the postmodernist epoch, writers became interested not in the historical past (facts, events, historical figures...), but in its interpretation. It was precisely the radically changed conditions of perceiving history that gave rise to the historiographic metafiction, as a new modification of the historical novel. Unlike the author of the classical historical novel, the author of historiographic metafiction is not interested in the authentic presentation of a concrete historical period; their protagonist searches for and finds their own "self" in the past in the form of various artifacts (scattered documents, photographs, letters from ancestors, forgotten histories, etc.), which call into question the concept of real, universally recognized history. Thus, historiographic metafiction can present a version of the past different from official history, conduct an independent historical investigation in order to "fill in" the white spots omitted by official history. In this article, drawing on the Magnus Opuses of two Western authors - Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson - we examine two different perspectives on the relationship between postmodernism and the historical novel and their echo in the novels of Georgian authors Aka Morchiladze and Dato Turashvili.

Keywords: historical past, interpretation, historiographic metafiction.