“We want us to notice, we want to feel exceptional. Narratives like “I will tell you my story”, “I will tell you the story of my family”, “I will tell you where I was” - today the most popular literary views. This is a large -scale phenomenon also because today we can use the letter everywhere, and many people receive this, once booked for a few, the ability to express themselves in a word and a story ”. I quote a fragment from the Nobel lecture by Olga Tokarchuk “Sensitive narrator” (is translated by Viktor Dmitruk). The counterpart to a completely fair remark of Tokarchuk sounds like this: why should I be interested in your story, your family, your travels? However, as the dynamics of the book market and the literary process shows, it is still interesting. At least in the second paragraph: “I will tell you the story of my family” stably attracts the attention of the reader.
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Both among Longsellers and among bestseller leaders holds a multi-generation historical novel or generation novel-chronicle, and in our tradition we most often call it a family saga or a family novel. At the end of the twentieth century, somewhere after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, at least in European literature, a memorial boom appears-the events of the hushed-up past require revision, so the role of a family novel at the end of the twentieth century is intensified. But he did not give up his positions for a century.
This genre variety has its own recognizable features. The plot of the work should be revealed in the interaction of several generations of one family - at least three. Each generation is written from their own perspective. There should be at least two types of character - the present and the past. In the present, one hero actualizes the past of the other: through diaries, reconstruction, direct questions, films found, albums, letters. Moreover, the plot of such novels is linear. A person moves from one transition to another: birth, marriage, the appearance of children, death. One generation replaces another, but the information that they must transmit to children and grandchildren is a little delay: first biology, then history.
The pathos of these works - certainty. In family novels, children and grandchildren work out the inheritance of parents, even if they do not know what they inherited, it will still manifest. There is nothing to be surprised. So there is no pathos and riddles in such novels, even if it is a novel-investigation. You will find about your grandmother even what you didn't look for. And finally, the main topos of the genre is a choice. Each generation makes its choice, and the plot displays it (grandfathers), its result (parents) and consequences (grandchildren). Not characters are important here, but relationships.
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In fact actually finished form. It is easier for both the author and the reader with ready -made forms. But the forms have the ability to obsolete, and quickly. But not this one! The family novel has become relevant after the First World War, and lives on. Why? Yes, because both sweet wine and a bitter medicine are poured into this drill.
I propose to make a time travel: from 1929 in 1982.
In 1929, the Nobel Prize in Literature received the novel by the debutant Thomas Mann " Snopad of the same homeland ”(recently reprinted the classic translation of Evgeny Popovich). Four generations of the family of merchants from Lubek, from 1835 to the beginning of the twentieth century. Their common work is the leadership of Johann Buddenbrok. They are warming up for this inheritance, they want it, they disdain it, the intrigues are weaved, they make a career. But the company, named by the name of the grandfather, determines the life of everyone with the same surname. When the fourth finally gives birth to the long-awaited heir of the company Hanno (Johann, as a great-grandfather), the theme of the inheritance-splashment is fully revealed. Hanno - a painful boy, has no talent for trading, dreams of music. Somehow a notebook with a family genealogical tree falls into his hands. He, having fun, brings a long line right under his “branch”. Ganno will die fifteen years old from typhoid. All. The family moves from the Johann burgher to the Johann artist, and this would be called civilizational progress: the community can afford activities that do not benefit-art-art. But in the name of the novel, nevertheless - " And the novel is still about degradation. Thomas Mann accompanies (not without irony, true) Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau - authors popular to the impossibility of "
From generation to generation in the family of Buddenbrook, more and more dental problems: for example, one of the heroes, Thomas, from this will die from this. This is literally. And if wider, then the entrepreneurial Protestant dynasty at the peak of their abilities is destroyed from the inside with ethical doubts about their own class-community. The centipede thought about where the thirty -second leg should move, and fell. By the way, the direct heir to Roman Mann is Mario Puzo's “Old Man Sunny” (translation by Miroslav Tomashchuk). Oddly enough to think about this work as a model of a family novel, but it is. A production production of a novel, where the family is also production, and capitalist.
In 1982, Rafael Garcia Marquez received Nobel, and it became impossible to talk about any family saga, avoiding comparison with the “stupids of air.
Jose Arcadio Buendia is married to the cousin of Ursula, they all scare them, that children with a pig’s tail are born from such marriages, so they do not dare to start making love. Friends are mocking the untenable man, he kills one of them in anger. Now the spirit of the deceased does not give him rest. Buendia breaks from the place, two dozens of fellow villagers depart follow him. Two years later, they will lay Macondo. Gypsy Melkiades warns: Macondo will disappear over time, and with him - and the whole genus of Buendia. Patriarchal life begins - with home sweets, epidemics and civil wars. Seven generations.
The book breaks up into three large parts: the foundation of Macondo is an economic flowering - the decline of Macondo. A child appears in the finale: the first in the city and the only one of Buendia, conceived in love. The baby has a pig tail. His parents forgot the phobia-Taba of their parents (incest: in every generation there are men in love with their relatives, but they do not give birth to children). The father of the tail of the baby, Aureliano Babilonya, reads parchment with the prophecy of Melkiades, where the story of his family is recorded. They write there: when he reads it to the end, the city will destroy a sandstone.
Both of these works are family sagas, exemplary from bone and blood, infinitely influential in world literature.
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Between the two novels, equivalent and equivalent literary masterpieces - a modification of our ideas about human communities. Namely: after the rise will be a decline, it is the natural development of any communities, you can perceive this decline as degradation and continue to think with the ideas of the progress of history, but you can come to the idea of the infinity of historical time, about the anti -liberacy of history (that is, it does not have the ultimate goal) and experience a decline as a return to the start. The sins of his parents inherited that you can do it, but you are social beings: agree among yourself that these were not sins, but treasures, and live in mercy. Something like that. The world was moving from privileged communities to the Pari communities, and a family novel was moving there. Now we are still here, by the way, in the "
It is important: around the chronicle document, imaginary communities are formed and stabilized, a family is a model that is easy to scale to the city, state, nation, universe (except that such scaling will be primarily ironic).
Oleg Kotsarev in the novel “People in the Gnodes” strips vignettes-retells fables, family stories about long-dead ancestors, from the XVII century to the moment when he himself in the mid-2010s, immediately after the outbreak of war, adults 33 years old (what symbols.! ) a man enters the text. At the end of the work, half -Sleep and in the vigorous greeting of Marquez, he will see all his heroes live in the same room. And they will behave like hooligans, the heroes absolutely got out of control. They came to him in a writer's residence to talk about the artistic method of the novel. But what is actually important here: he does not know some of the visitors, some strangers fell into his work and want to be noticed.
In the 2010s, literary critics were inclined to define a family novel as a social diagnosis: the communities are sick, they need to prescribe treatment. In the last century, family novels read mostly as a forecast. Thus, the literary concept of “family novel” came closer to the same concept in psychoanalysis. Otto Rank suggested that the child has in the reality of the life of the life of guardians, which in the history of which this child, having become an adult will tell or recreate, can be replaced, say, socially higher beings. Real guardians depreciate. And the replacement of them by other figures indicates unconscious ideas and desires. I rudely and superficially retold, and coincidence with a literary approach to a family novel should be obvious.
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I repeat: the family novel strongly after the First World War, it was then that this genre variety began to develop separately from the historical chronicle. The next peak is the end of 1940s. Survived his European Renaissance Family Roman and in the 1990s. Family history sprouts where there is a rupture of historical narrative.
I regularly observe this, I do not pretend to be a representative sample, but I put forward a hypothesis. In the literature of countries where the war continues or its hot stage has just ended, family novels are becoming very popular. Basque Country. Sri Lanka. Georgia. Syria. Bosnia. Ukraine. They become a way of self -affirmation of identity. In the end, the sum of related stories explains to each member of the family who he is, but not to a lesser extent who he shows outside. Policy of the identity and policies of the representative office " The family in such novels acts as a protagonist of national history, is a collective experience. At the same time, each generation will interpret the events fateful for the nation in its own way. But there is one thing that combines such family novels. They do not end with the death of the last descendant. Even if the world disappears in a minute, on the last pages of this work there will be a living healthy child. These novels are quite therapeutic, although they are unlikely to realize themselves. They retain generations lost in the war, including unborn.
And one more thing: the first books written in exile in the new diasporas written by refugees will be most likely to be family novels. I also put forward a hypothesis, observing the literature of different diasporas in Canada for example. Social journalist Madvar himself reads several chitic Canadian family novels of the 2020s and records the “moment of synergy”, which requires a conversation about the modern inter-generation chronicle. I will quote her words and leave this conversation with an open finale. In the end, this conversation is about how people try to imagine immortality, telling the stories of their families and believing that someone will hear them, the closed finale cannot be here.
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“In each such book, characters are struggling with the movement and diaspora life in the way that is very reasonable to me now. I, like the authors, are a millennial. Our generation is approaching the middle age and related issues like “who we are? \? \? I read a lot of inter -generation family prose in the past, but this genre has acquired a meaning for me exactly now that I myself have children and I am worried about which world I will transfer them to them ”.
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