Zen Buddhist Motifs in A. Makushinsky’s novel ‘The Stopped World’
L. Dubakov
Вестник Пермского университета. Российская и зарубежная филология 2022 DOI: 10.17072/2073-6681-2022-3-78-86 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Buddhism |
| Key points | Argues that Zen Buddhism shapes the poetics of A. Makushinsky's novel The Stopped World through principles of the emptiness of reality, the illusory nature of the 'I', and the relativity of time and space, and through parallels such as sky and water, photography, and architecture that express a 'stopped world'. The author contends the novel both depicts a world perceived in meditation and depicts the world from meditation, and proposes extending the structural-semiotic approach from urban-cultural to religious literary analysis. |
Abstract
The article aims to comprehend the impact of Zen Buddhism, its philosophical positions and practices on the problems and poetics of the novel by A. Makushinsky The Stopped World. The Buddhist influence in the novel is manifested in the literary implementation of the principles of the emptiness of reality, the illusory nature of the human ‘I’, the relativity of time and space, and also in the features of the created characters, landscapes and interiors, in the organization of the chronotope. Based on the results of the study, it can be stated that in The Stopped World A. Makushinsky not only depicts the world perceived in meditation by means of a thorough and detailed analysis of all components of reality but also literally depicts the world from meditation. The writer draws attention to the principle of universal connections of things showing the similarities of various characters in the novel. The Stopped World is looking for parallels that would most adequately explain what Zen and human consciousness are. Such parallels are sky and water, photography, architecture. Each of them expresses the dynamics that have become static, the fuss that has become peace, or the ‘stopped world’. The theoretical and methodological base of the work rests on the research conducted by V. Toporov (on the ‘Petersburg text’) and P. Alexeev (on the ‘Muslim text’): the precedent translation of the structural-semiotic approach from the urban-cultural into the religious sphere allows us to apply it also to the literary study of the presence of Buddhist ideas and motifs in the text. The relevance of the article is determined by the low level of knowledge of the presence of Buddhism in Russian literature as one of the world religions and one of the traditional religions of Russia. The article is novel in that it attempts to provide a consistent and broad study of the ‘Buddhist text’ of modern Russian literature based on thenovel The Stopped World by A. Makushinsky taking into account the writer’s poetic work.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on buddhism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience | 1995 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Too Early to Tell: The Potential Impact and Challenges—Ethical and Otherwise—Inherent in the Mainstreaming of Dharma in an Increasingly Dystopian World | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From self to nonself: The Nonself Theory | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |