The principles of werewolfism and zoomorphization of reality in the novel by A. A. Starobinets «Fox Fords»

Dubakov Leonid ORCID: 0000-0003-1172-7435 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Faculty of Philology, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University 518172, China, Shenzhen, Guojidaxueyuan str., 1 dubakov_leonid@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Zhang Ikhan' Graduate student, Faculty of Philology, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University 518172, China, Shenzhen, Guojidaxueyuan str., 1 1409280516@qq.com Other publications by this author

In Anna Starobinets's novel "Fox Fords", werewolves act as central characters, among others. A brief description of the image of Huli-ching in this book is given in the articles by D. A. Pogorelko "Motifs of Chinese mythology in the novel by A. A. Starobinets "Fox Fords" ^[9] and "On the question of the reception of Chinese "stories about the strange" in Russian literature" by D. Han, O. D. Tugulova, Z. D. Bardakhanova ^[12]. However, the actual philological consideration of the image of the werewolf fox in the novel by Anna Starobinets is only present to a small extent in these works for various reasons. The presented article fills this gap and analyzes the image of the Huli-ching and other werewolves from the point of view of projecting the phenomenon of werewolf, bestiality on various components of the literary text.

The werewolf fox (Chinese: 狐狸精, pinyin húli jīng) in the Chinese bestiary is a predominantly negative character: its essence is predatory: she takes away the vital energy of the person she enchants. Despite the fact that, of course, at the same time, huli-ching (in the form of a nine-tailed fox) also has another dimension.: she can act as a spiritual seeker who aspires to higher worlds. In this regard, it should be noted that the image of a werewolf fox is a dynamic image that changes from epoch to epoch and acquires its own individual features from one author or another. The werewolf fox is one of the iconic characters in Chinese culture. It embodies a complex set of meanings (ideological, religious, mystical, artistic), reflecting one of the components of the Chinese mentality (see: ^{[1; 2; 3; 4]}).

Russian literature of recent decades, unlike modern Chinese literature, has shown an active interest in this character. Thus, since the mid-1980s, the image of a werewolf fox has appeared in the works of Elena Schwartz (see: ^[6]), Viktor Pelevin (see: ^{[5; 7]}), Holm van Zaichik (pseudonym of Igor Alimov and Vyacheslav Rybakov), Yuri Mamleev (see: ^[8]), By Anna Korosteleva, Anna Starobinets. In 2010, a collection of prose "Fox Honesty" was published (compiled by Marta Ketro; one of the authors is the famous poet Dmitry Vodennikov), which contains motifs related to the Huli Ching. One of the reasons for this interest is probably the general interest in Chinese culture, especially in its exotic aspect. On the other hand, the image of Huli-ching is surprisingly plastic, it allows you to put different contents into yourself, evokes different emotions. The werewolf fox, in addition to its werewolf nature, reveals its pronounced femininity for Russian writers.

Anna Starobinets's image of the main character of the novel, the werewolf Lisa, is ambivalent (on her mother she is a werewolf, on her father she is a human) and at the same time Russified (her mother is the werewolf fox Anli, her father is a Riga German, a subject of the Russian Empire, which means that one way or another a man of great Russian culture is Wilhelm von Junger). Russian Russian Russian Russian waswolf is also carried out by the writer by placing her in a Russian national context: Lisa lives among Russians on Russian territory, speaks Russian, etc. This cultural duality is also reflected in the heroine's name, Elizabeth Bo. Russian Russian mother Nastya, who was born to a Russian father and also has a werewolf nature, thus turns out to be almost completely Russian huli-ching: "Nastya's hair was light brown, slightly wavy, not Chinese at all; she hoped that this russetness, this Russianness would protect her ^{[11, p. 313]}. In other words, Anna Starobinets, in her Russification of the Chinese werewolf fox, goes further than other Russian writers, leaving only her Chinese definition and indirect involvement in the Chinese family as one of the huli-jin (Nastya's family ties with her grandmother and grandmother's sisters, who are werewolves, are indicated in the novel).

O. A. Popova and E. A. Grigorova in the article "The organization of time and space in the novel by A. A. Starobinets "Fox Fords" point to the mystical nature of the chronotope of the book: "mystical, mythological, characterizing the world of spirits (including the dead) and dreams, space and time are important in the work" ^{[10, p. 2Also, according to them, the border town "becomes the focus of diverse cultural codes, intricately intertwined with each other and creatively comprehended by the author" [10, p. 3]}. Indeed, the novel takes place in a place called Lisye Brody, not far from the CER. Russian Russians and Chinese live together, representatives of the Soviet government are sometimes indistinguishable from the Hunghuz in their actions, Chinese werewolves for Russian Old Believers become the embodiment of ideas about evil spirits, and so on. Separately, it should be noted that the Fox Fords ‒ this is an animal toponym that actualizes not only the motif that directly speaks about the fox, but also evokes the idea of the process of "transition", or "transformation", or "metamorphosis" of a werewolf: a ford is a shallow place through which you can cross. Other animal toponyms and hydronyms of the novel – Lake Lisye, Snake Bay, Black Fox Hill ‒ also emphasize the "transitional" nature of the book's space. Thus, the phenomenon of werewolf manifests itself not only in the Huli-ching and other werewolves of the book themselves, but also in the nature of the space within which they exist.

Similarly, one can look at the specifics of the organization of time in the Fox Fords. O. A. Popova and E. A. Grigorova note that the book contains "two main chronotopes – paths and rings, the coexistence of which represents the unity and struggle of two opposites, which is clearly expressed in the image of the great Taoist Zhao, who is also a road." (path), and lake (ring, circle)" ^{[10, p. 3]}. So, at one time of the novel, the past, describing a circle, turns into the present. Nurse Aglaya turns out to be the rebirth of Xifeng, who re-enters into a relationship with her lover and murderer Lama, Master Zhao, who once rejected his disciple Lama for predatory behavior, private Pavel Ovcharenko of the Red Army, who once again observes how the Lama, in pursuit of knowledge and power, goes on the path of destroying others. The past becomes the present for Maxim Kronin, who remembers who he is; for Colonel Baron Anton von Junger, the son of Wilhelm von Junger, Lisa's father, who wants power over the world; for Colonel Aristov, who seeks to bring back his mentalist student Kronin, etc.

The werewolf Lisa (Elizabeth Bo) and the other werewolves of the book make their "transition" in different ways. Anna Starobinets is looking for her own artistic explanations of werewolf transformation. She offers Chinese alchemical comparisons of the process of "shifting" or describes it as the result of an exercise in spiritual practice. The writer, based on Chinese myths and legends about the origin of werewolves, their connection with the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, with the Taoists, etc., creates her own mythology of the Huli Ching. In this synthetic author's mythology, Huli-ching is primarily a daughter and a mother. Lisa the fox, caught up in the struggle for an artifact ‒ red cinnabar, or living water, and for power (a terracotta army waiting to be revived, resurrected), solves her family problems: her daughter Nastya will not survive the "transition" because she is cursed by Master Zhao, and the roots of this curse are in the unrighteous, predatory life of the whole family Huli-ching. In addition to huli-ching, there are other werewolves in Fox Fords: a Lama who turns into a tiger, Andron, Nikitka, Oyama, who became werewolves as a result of Japanese experiments. But Anna Starobinets presents werewolves more broadly: it's not just about werewolves in the literal sense, but also about the diverse transformations of the characters. So, for example, the main character Max Cronin, having killed Shutov, becomes him, the captain of SMERSH, not only taking his documents, but also taking over his personality as an actor. Xifeng comes to Aglaya's consciousness through "possession". Werewolves, Anton von Junger, and Colonel Aristov control people through hypnosis or entering dreams, while simultaneously making people their dolls and influencing the world through their bodies, as if becoming them. Master Zhao, as often repeated in the novel, has thousands of faces, and this is a property of his developed spiritual nature. Separately, we can talk about the motif of the doll with painted eyes in the novel: a living person turns into a dead one, revealing his illusory nature on the path of life. And he has the opportunity to return to the world of the living for a while, influencing it, in particular, through the consciousness of mentalists Maxim Kronin and Aglaya. The terracotta army is also alive, but turned into the dead before the time.: "the baron was covered – as if he had grown a second skin – with a layer of dense brown clay" ^{[11, p. 339]}.

In addition to projecting the phenomenon of werewolves onto various components of a literary text, Anna Starobinets implements the principle of a diverse zoomorphization of reality in general and endows it with a transformational character: thus, the book turns out to be not a novel about werewolves, but a novel specifically about werewolves and bestiality. Thus, the writer, speaking about heroes, objects, and abstract phenomena, actively uses animal comparisons ("I breathe hotly and often, like a sick dog" ^{[11, p. 5]}, Pica "began to wave his hands absurdly", "like a cat" ^{[11, p. 19]}, snitch Rodin"he looks like a horsefly figuring out where it is more convenient to suck" ^{[11, p. 146]}, he is "like a garbage pigeon" ^{[11, p. 197]}), animal metaphors (he looks at the blood, "a thin scarlet snake crawling out of the corner of his blue lips" ^{[11, p. 109]}, "melancholy has risen, she bit him right in the throat with a forked sting and slid back under his heart, curling up in a familiar spiral" ^{[11, p. 116]}, he remained next to "a snake's tangle of Bickford cords" ^{[11, p. 454]}, "the proboscis of the phonendoscope poked into three whitish horizontal lines" ^{[11, p. 52]}). The text turns into a living being ("Two spreading, predatory centipedes of Japanese hieroglyphs" ^{[11, p. 41]}, "ink insect paws of alien ancient signs" ^{[11, p. 62]}, "columns of snaking hieroglyphs" ^{[11, p. 603]}), the plant world ‒ text ("Black tree on a distant hill - like a hieroglyph, the meaning of which I should know, but do not know" ^{[11, p. 68]}).

In the portraits of the characters ("Her fluffy eyebrows twitch slightly ‒ like a singed, helpless moth" ^{[11, p. 126]}, Bo's bald head "resembled the shell of a speckled turtle, and the deep wrinkles on her forehead were rings of time on a log cabin" ^{[11, p. 135]}, Busygin's eyes "like two dung flies" ^{[11, p. 278]}), in their costumes (he "hungrily pulls a shiny butterfly around his neck, as if it were digging its paws into him" ^{[11, p. 126]}), as well as in landscapes, bestial features often appear ("Predawn fog shrouds the hills with a fluffy cocoon, as if preparing them for transformation" ^{[11, p. 241]}, "the quagmire turns into a flood meadow surrounded on all sides by a wall of fog. The heads of fleshy white flowers crackle under the horses' hooves" ^{[11, p. 237]}, the river disappeared, "slithering like a snake from the hillside into the depths of Fox Lake" ^{[11, p. 345]}). The characters have "zoological" surnames (Ovcharenko, Siloviev (Solovyov), Andron Sych, Alyoshchenok).

The novel contains invective vocabulary ("Are you lucky, dog..." ^{[11, p. 266]}, "So you want to humiliate Major Boyko, scare him, rat?" ^{[11, p. 89]}) and phraseological units with references to animal images ("I'm saving my skin..." ^{[11, p. 667]}).

The reality of "Fox Fords" seems to be decomposed into components and reassembled: animals with signs of other animals appear on the pages of the book ("There is such an animal there: a beaver himself, and a beak like a duck. And another one is like a wolf, with a bag on its belly like a kangaroo" ^{[11, p. 586]}), internal organs can be rearranged in the bodies of living creatures (a werewolf tiger has a heart on the right side instead of the left), trees acquire animal features, etc.

So, in the novel "Fox Fords" by Anna Starobinets, it is important not only that werewolves and, in particular, Chinese werewolves are in the center of the plot, but above all that the writer carries out their Russification, as well as that the principles of werewolfism and zoomorphization of reality are projected in the book on various components of the literary text.. "Fox Fords" contains a significant number of animal comparisons and metaphors concerning people, natural objects, objects and abstract phenomena. Animal motifs are evident in the portraits and names of the characters, in the toponymic nomination, in the landscapes, in the language of the work. The principles of shapeshifting and zoomorphization create an artistic time and space in the "Fox Fords", revealing the multi-layered and at the same time the true nature of the characters. Depending on the moral nature of the character, he may be more human than animal, despite his werewolf nature, and vice versa ‒ more animal than human, choosing the path of a predator, tied to the satisfaction of his own desires.