Werewolfism as a way to gain transcendent reality (on the material of Yuri Mamleyev's short stories «The Teacher», Martha Ketro's «The Fox Wife» and Dmitry Vodennikov's «Confession of a Chinese Fox-Werewolf»)

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

The werewolf fox is one of the most significant symbols of Far Eastern mythology. Her image embodies many meanings (ideological, religious, mystical, artistic), reflecting one of the components of the Eastern mentality (see: ^{[1; 2; 3; 4]}).

Chinese traditions have their own versions of werewolves, such as huli-ching, Japanese kitsune, Korean kumiho, and Vietnamese ho tin. Russian literature of the late 20th century, and especially the latest literature, is actively mastering and Russifying this image. At the same time, Russian writers rely for the most part on the Chinese tradition, which has a literary codification that has long been translated into Russian ‒ a collection of short stories by Pu Songlin, "Description of the Miraculous from Liao's Cabinet," or "Liao-zhai-zhi-yi." Images of Huli-ching are represented in the poetry of E. Schwartz (see: ^[9]), V. Pelevin in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (see: ^{[7; 10]}), in the novels The Case of the Werewolves by Holm van Zaichik (the pseudonym of Igor Alimov and Vyacheslav Rybakov) and Fox Fords A. Starobinets, in the story of A. Korosteleva "Cinnamon flowers, plum flavor". One of the first references to the image of the werewolf fox in Russian literature ‒ This is a short story by Yu.V. Mamleev, "The Teacher" (1980).

N. Y. Kononova in her work "The system of metaphysical motives in the stories of Y. Mamleev 1960-1974" in the section "Images of animals and evil spirits: a representation of the metaphysical nature of non-human beings" writes that the inhuman images of Mamleev's prose, as well as the motives of physicality and madness, are associated with the disclosure of the "metaphysical nature of man", aimed at the search for the "mystical aura" that every living being has"; among other things, these images indicate that "the real world is an "appearance"" and that "only with comprehension of the meaning of one's earthly incarnation is it possible to reach the level of higher Being" ^{[16, p. 17]}. In relation to the story "The Teacher", N. Y. Yevtushenko says the same thing in the article "The mythological nature of the artistic picture of the world: the image of the werewolf-fox in Y. Mamleev's story "The Teacher": "Through the mythological image of the werewolf, the writer shows the boundlessness of Existence, in which, besides the visible reality, there is another (Absolute, Extraneous)" ^{[11, p. 90]} ‒ and M. V. Yakovlev and A.V. Karpenko in the article "The werewolf motif in the works of F. M. Dostoevsky and Yu. V. Mamleev (based on the stories "Crocodile" and "Teacher")": Mamleev's werewolf fox is "a mythical creature that has a transcendental understanding of the Absolute" ^{[21, p. 146]}.

In addition to the ontological coincidence of the images of a fox and a crocodile, noted by the above-mentioned researchers, the Mamleev story is related to the artistic world of F. M. Dostoevsky by the behavioral and verbal foolishness of the main character, similar to the type of "little man". This foolishness of his, which gives rise to the thought of Captain Snegirev and Captain Lebyadkin at the same time, is expressed in social disorder, as well as in the abundance of diminutive suffixes of his speech. Separately, one can pay attention to the interspersing of two grotesque lines of poetry in the prose text: "Two artists painted something surreal near the trees, hiding from the rain" ^[17], reminiscent of the poem from the drafts of "Crocodile" "Into the valley of tears of citizenship..." ^{[19, p. 221]}. By the way, Dostoevsky's possible presence in the story is evident at the very beginning of "The Teacher" in a landscape sketch: "Leaves rolled, clouds raced across the sky like the thoughts of an epileptic" ^[17]. But, of course, the main thing about the character of the "Teacher" is his ability to see the otherness in everyday life: "I had a strange condition. One of its features was that everything that was happening in the world made real sense, as if the usual veil of visibility had been stripped away" ^[17].

The encounter with the werewolf fox is preceded by the displacement of internal and external reality recorded by the hero. Reality does not feel unconditional to him, it has a pessimistic-oneiric character: he had a "sleepy concentration on himself, as if the world did not exist", the world itself "was somehow pushed aside, as if he was tired of existing" ^[17]. The hero even doubts his own existence and wants to see himself in the mirror and hear his heartbeat. Reality is not absolute, and it is no coincidence that a meeting with a werewolf fox takes place at a cinema, a place where illusions are demonstrated. Mamleev further unfolds this metaphor: people ("people") were crowding near the cinema ‒ those who want to get a ticket, but none of them needs the ticket that the werewolf fox has. People reject him, like Ivan Karamazov, who "most respectfully" ^{[8, p. 276]} returned his entrance ticket to heaven to God. Tolya and Irina have an extra ticket, but people bought other extra tickets. Here, the definition of "superfluous" seems to flicker with two meanings: the extra tickets that people buy are unnecessary for them, as they will lead them to view another earthly illusion, the extra ticket of Tolya and Irina is superfluous for them, but in fact the ticket to the otherworldly that others need. The life of people on earth is like whirling in a fog: they were "scurrying around", "about" buying a ticket; we were "walking around people in a fog", "I looked around: there was no lady around" ^[17]. In the last phrase, a lexical glitch is also interesting: a werewolf fox, a "lady with a chanterelle" around her neck is seen by the hero constantly in motion, circling next to people.

Irina is a werewolf, and her vision, among other things, is dual: she sees reality through the eyes of a human and the eyes of an animal: for example, she "takes the sun for a berry" ^[17]. In addition, her shapeshifting also manifests itself in the grammar of speech.: "She uses the subject as a predicate, and the predicate becomes the subject" ^[17]. But the main feature of her vision is the ability to see the Outside of "all Existence (and even Non-Existence)" ^[17].

Irina is able to influence the world around her, infecting others with her vision and her nature. So, the hero, after talking to Tolya and leaving with her, "whined tearfully" ^[17]. At the same time, something werewolf was present in him from the beginning: one of his ex-wives considered him a werewolf.

A fox who has become a human has "something foxy" in his face, but portrait similarity is not the main thing for the hero: fox features, in his opinion, can be found in humans, "especially in women" ^[17]. The "monstrous transition" of a fox caught near Ryazan was expressed in the appearance of human thoughts in her mind. But what is a miracle for the hero: "several million years of the most complex evolution" ^[17], is for her an "absurdity" and a catastrophe. Conceptualizing thinking is rather the defeat of someone who is connected with the otherworldly: the main character "had a light, familiar body, as if stuck together with thoughts," Irina, on the contrary, "when the first thoughts appeared," she was "out of fear." <...> started barking at them" ^[17]. Intelligence obscures otherness from a person: the professor considers the heroine's metamorphosis to be "trifles", the neighbor doctor considers her a psychopath. Irina, or rather her former body, the fox skin hugging her neck, is perceived by the hero as "battered": the phraseology here can also be read literally: the werewolf fox is able to see the true substantial basis of reality: her "gaze was a little blunt." <...> substantial" ^[17]. The latter definition, however, may be an ironic synonym for the definition of "heavy" (look).

Irina, like, for example, the Chinese werewolf fox, is wittingly or unwittingly capable of inducing sexualizing confusion on a person or exacerbating those passions that are inherent in human nature. So, after talking with her, the hero plunges his soul into the fog, a little later Tolya, who appeared next to him again, "giggled" into his "flesh", then the hero himself hexes, pronouncing the desire for a threesome marriage. But her real intentions are different. Irina becomes a teacher for the hero of the story and her husband, but her desire to open up to them is Extraneous./The otherworldly encounters their unwillingness to do so: like the audience near the cinema, they do not buy a real "ticket" to another world from her and, most importantly, do not try to see it. She even "started reading a textbook on copromat" ^[17]: the human material resists her teaching. As a result, men wake up castrated, and the werewolf fox disappears ("she went to her Father, ascended" ^[17]). Castration makes them smarter, "but only in the most vile, careerist way" ^[17]. They develop a deluded mind that generates aggressive and suicidal thoughts. Their giggling at the end also demonstrates the presence of some kind of malfunction in this mind. They become scientists, but on the contrary, they distance themselves from salvation, from the attainment of a transcendent reality: "... where are you, our Teacher, who saved yourself?" ^[17]. People have not conquered their conceptualizing mind and base nature, and therefore they are left alone ‒ without divinity and inspiration.

Martha Ketro's short story "The Fox Wife" (2009), at first glance, can be attributed to love or psychological prose devoted to relationships. The main character of the story, Olenka, who came to Moscow from the provinces, marries a rich man, repeating the fate of Cinderella. However, the very beginning of the first chapter, which is a free ironic retelling of the Japanese folk tale "The Fox Wife" ^[18], introduces the image of a werewolf fox into the narrative and reveals Olenka's hidden thoughts: "I run and run ‒ on dry grass, on black earth, on white snow. There are footprints behind, and a clear field ahead. One day, when I'm perfect, I'll stop leaving marks. I'll look back, and there's a clear field behind me" ^[15]. These four sentences point to the concept of perfection developed by the American writer and mystic Carlos Castaneda, and recall his thoughts about the seeker's detachment from earthly reality. Perfection in his books is a special psychophysical state in which a person feels neither a sense of self‒importance nor a sense of pity and evaluates any of his actions through the prospect of approaching death: the goal of a warrior is "to get rid of a sense of self-importance, taking responsibility for his actions and using death as an adviser" [14the warrior "lightly touches" the world, staying in it just as long as necessary, and then quickly leaves without leaving any traces" [12]. In Marta Ketro's story, Carlos Castaneda is mentioned in an ironic context: "... in the midst of typical Castaneda chatter, a little shameful between people over thirty" ^[15] ‒ however, this irony is rather seen as veiling his active presence in the subtext.

Marta Ketro does not directly call Olenka a werewolf fox, but the text contains numerous hints about her fox nature. When Pavel circles the numbers of the phone number Olenka left him after the first meeting, he notes "the pointed corners of the seven, the graceful curve of the one and the dashing tail of the two" ^[15]. The zoomorphic graphics of the numbers here can probably be considered as a portrait of the heroine, at least "graphological". The heroine moves to Moscow, and buys herself an "ugly kennel" ^[15]. A kennel is a shelter for dogs, but dogs and foxes are the closest relatives. Pavel buys her a red fur coat in Turkey. Olenka's lover, Clover, leaves her "gray hairs, takes away the red ones" ^[15]. Having finally become attached to her husband, Olenka, comparing herself to a fox and evoking memories of Far Eastern legends, thinks that "Now she cannot escape unnoticed into the night, except to bite off a paw caught in a trap, as is customary with foxes, or to cut off the sleeve of a robe according to the custom of emperors, well, to cut her hair, speaking in English."-simple" ^[15]. Balancing between the metaphor of a werewolf and reality, the writer gives Olenka the inherent kitsune gift to penetrate men's dreams. The sex of the heroine with Clover in the story is conveyed through the image of intertwining tails (which, in addition, refers to the "Sacred Book of the Werewolf" by V. O. Pelevin ^[20], where the fox is a werewolf and Hoolie and the werewolf Sasha Gray entered into a love relationship in this way).

Olenka, like a werewolf fox, deceives, and in this creation of a beautiful and sharp deception, she sees her mission to brighten up life: "Suddenly there is an acute desire to twist reality in a special way to create a complex elegant structure that includes "what did not happen", fragments of truth and <...> the nervous reaction of the person to whom the deception is addressed" ^[15]. Olenka is capable not only of causing a love affair, but also a car crash: so, she turned out to be able to imitate the deep style of the writer Ukropov. The heroine also recalls the story of "Lisa" (Elizabeth) "Dmitrieva", a poet of the Silver Age who created a literary hoax, the "disguise" of the Chinese poet Li Xiangzi. And in the context of the story, there is an involuntary echo of the word "fox" in this name. As well as the diminutive form of the name of the poetess herself ‒ the word "fox". The Chinese motif is also evident in the story through a quote from N. S. Gumilev's poem "I believed, I thought..." embedded in the text and ironic through the context: "I woke up to a thin ringing. A porcelain bell in yellow China immediately surfaced, but I immediately realized that it was the sound of glasses ‒ the guys decided to drink to something."^[15]

Olenka's main fear is that they might see her ‒ see her true nature: she was afraid of "other people's cold eyes that would try to look at her, the real one" ^[15]. But that's exactly what happens at the end of the story. She learns that her husband has long known about her love affair with Clover and the reasons for this relationship. As in the Japanese fairy tale "The Monk and the Fox", where the werewolf fox was not skillful enough to confuse and pretend to be beautiful ^[22], so in Martha Ketro's "The Fox Wife" the main character loses her power over people. After consuming mezcal (referring to Carlos Castaneda) and awakening the truth, she sees the world as flawless, and the story ends with a poetic passage using fabulous lexical formulas, with which it began, but now the willingness to escape is replaced by its realization, and the first person turns into the third: the heroine "hurried for the blue forests, for the high mountains, "no one noticed the small red‒haired body flying like an arrow, and no one happened to make out if there were footprints in the white snow."^[15]

As in the beginning of "The Fox Wife", so at the end there is no definite answer to the question of whether Olenka was a werewolf fox, or Martha Ketro describes in it a certain female psychotype, metaphorically correlated with a werewolf fox from Far Eastern fairy tales. However, the love story and the psychological observations of the story are set aside by the story of the possible spiritual transformation of the main character. In Note 2 to The Fox Wife, the writer points out that the story is about a fox who lost herself in mirrors and sought perfection ("probably so that it wouldn't be so scary to be reflected in a thousand mirrors" ^[15]), a story she once read as a child and which became one of the foundations of this The story doesn't have a definite ending for her.: she herself does not know if "The red-haired soul has found peace and perfection or is still running in fear" ^[15].

However, it can be said for sure that the fox-Deer strives to attain a transcendent reality, running away from people and, perhaps, from the earthly world altogether. Speaking about her defeat, she recalls the command "Die, Fox", which in turn recalls A. A. Vitukhnovskaya's poem "Die, Fox". The heroine of Vitukhnovskaya, whether through love or through her murder, conveys her nature and her appearance to another: "In front of the mirror you are red-haired woolly, / Like an animal with a monster inside. / You will be reflected by me one day. / I'll tell you: "DIE, FOX, DIE."^[5] Thus, the story "The Fox Wife" can be read as the werewolf's renunciation of his bodily form and the illusory forms he generates in order to achieve Castaneda's freedom, and as stated in The Power of Silence, "the magician's ticket to freedom is his death" ^[13].

"Confessions of a Chinese Werewolf" (2008) by D. B. Vodennikov can be called a short story, you can see the genre of the essay in this work. The author himself introduced the genre of confession into the title, although this confession constantly turns into an invective. The hero of "Confession" is a werewolf fox, but his fantastic appearance is seen rather as a metaphor for otherness. He is the author's alter ego. It is no coincidence that the phrase sounds at the end: "On the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, I will turn forty. And I don't have the energy to wait another ten minutes to turn into a human being" ^{[6, p. 208]}. Of course, we are talking about the writer himself, who turned forty years old in 2008, when the first publication of this story took place.

The inner plot of "Confession", framed by quotations from Pu Songlin's stories and Wu Chengen's "Journey to the West" and fused with the stylistics of Russian fairy tales and folk songs, is the maturation of a werewolf fox, which gradually grows one tail after another. These tails are a metaphor for the experience of many loves and disappointments. The werewolf fox is depicted in his relationship with a human being ‒ with parents and lovers, none of whom wants to accept that he is different, does not want to accept his freedom. "Confession"-an invective showing ordinary human fears: fear of loneliness when losing love and fear of loneliness when rejected by society. The werewolf fox is not afraid of either, and therefore his possible love appears free and pure.

Vodennikov's werewolf fox is capable of transformations, creating other images of himself, but people can create images no worse ‒ only images of others, not themselves: "... you are not seen for who you really are, but they will come up with some kind of image and live with it" ^{[6, p. 204]}. Grave grave creates a predictable and stuffy human way of life, and it is not the werewolf fox who lives in the grave, as they say in the Chinese stories about the Huli Ching, but people place themselves in a "love grave" ^{[6, p. 199]}, in their burrow, they have "Behind the doors ‒ economy, rootedness, relatives, the chain dog barks" ^{[6, p. 200]}.

The hero of "Confession" refuses to transform in the finale: "I don't have the strength to transform into anyone anymore. Not a boy, not a girl, not a woman, not a man, not a speaker from heaven, not an old man, not a scientist" ^{[6, p. 208]}. This enumeration looks not only like a list of fantastic images available to werewolves, but also as a set of poetic roles of the author, which he rejects. Recalling the myth of a fox that grows nine tails and whose fur transforms, the hero of "Confession" leaves and leaves his body to people: "... let's assume that this dusty dirty rag with nine tails is my gift to you. On the hat. And what? In my opinion, it suits you" ^{[6, p. 208]}. The image of the "rag" here again evokes the poem "Die, Fox" by A. A. Vitukhnovskaya: "Spread me out like a rag in the grass, / And say, 'Die, fox, die.'"^[5] The werewolf fox leaves the earthly world, crumbling "into road dust", becoming a "discarded dead skin" ^{[6, p. 206]}, turning into a heavenly fox, while people get only a coarse material void that can be used in everyday needs. In other words, the traditional conflict between the poet and the crowd is resolved in "Confessions of a Chinese Werewolf" by the realization of their multi-vector movement ‒ the person remains in the earthly "hole", the werewolf fox finds his transcendent reality.

So, in the analyzed stories by Yu.V. Mamleev, Marta Ketro, and D. B. Vodennikov, the image of a fox (fox)-a werewolf is central. At the same time, the writers leave the question of whether their hero is a genuine werewolf or whether their werewolf acts only as a metaphor for the borderline status, the state of the hero, unclear to the end.

In each of the works, this character of Far Eastern mythology, while retaining some of his traditional features and goals, is inscribed in a modern context for the author ‒ the communal Soviet life of the 1980s or the Russian one-dimensional reality of the noughties, Russified.

The image of a werewolf fox is the image of a hero who, due to his inverted nature, has the ability to come into contact with otherworldliness. It can be said that the characters of "The Teacher", "The Fox Wife", and "Confessions of a Chinese Werewolf" are more or less spiritual seekers striving for a transcendent reality, and at the same time discoverers and guides of this reality for the people with whom they are in a relationship.

The heroine of Yuri Mamleev's story teaches how to find the "Outside" through the rejection of intellectualism and conceptualizing thinking, as well as through the rejection of bodily desires. The heroine of Marta Ketro is looking for perfection in the Castaneda sense of the word and the possibility of getting rid of her werewolf nature, prone to generating, albeit aesthetic, but dangerous phantoms. The hero of "Confessions of a Chinese Werewolf", feeling and realizing his otherness, despairing of the inability to tell the truth, breaks ties with the world of ordinary people.