How to Cite
Abstract
The article focuses on The Harsh Field, the novel by A. V. Kalinin the Don writer, in the light of the ‘‘frontier thesis’’. The initial understanding of the frontier as a clash of wilderness and civilization (F. J. Turner) is complemented by the results of recent works on the theory of the frontier, which significantly enriched the Turner’s thesis with philosophical, culturological, spiritual, mental, and existential aspects. The purpose of the study is to identify various types of the frontier (historical, geographical, cultural, anthropological, existential, and chronological) that unite the entire literary work, gaining expression in the specific ideological, thematic, imaginative, compositional, and spatial-temporal features of the novel. It is shown that the novel is organized by the ‘friend or foe’ opposition, which is realized as the antagonism between the Soviet soldiers and fascists, the native land and the alien one, the human nature and the animal one. The alien world in the novel has the signs of danger, hostility, otherworldliness, and these signs manifest themselves both in the cultural-anthropological aspect and at the level of artistic space. The existential frontier represents the intersection of the categories of life and death, fear and courage. The chronological frontier is based on the dense interweaving of the present and the past, and on the idea of the connection of times and generations. The authors conclude that all these types of the frontier are interwoven in the novel and, bringing the theme of war to the fore, actualize the ideas of unification, brotherhood, and generational continuity.
References
Agapkina, T. A. (2012). Pine Tree. In N. I. Tolstoy (Ed.), Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary in 5 Volumes (Vol. 5, pp. 134–137). Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya. (In Russian).
Andreeva, A. A. (2014). “Frontier” as a Cultural and Historical Category. Bulletin of Maikop State Technological University, 3, 11–15. (In Russian).
Baiburin, A. K. (1983). Housing in the Rites and Beliefs of the Eastern Slavs. Nauka. (In Russian).
Bataeva, A. S.-E. (2015). The idea of Water as a Symbol of Death in the Poem of George Byron’s “Darkness”. Vestnik Universiteta Rossiyskoy Akademii obrazovaniya, 1, 44–49. (In Russian).
Dalada, N. F. (1965). Roots That Never Die: On the Work of Anatoly Kalinin. Moscow Worker. (In Russian).
Dalada, N. F. (1984). The Harsh Path of Truth (Anatoly Kalinin). In Horizons of Heroism (pp. 142–184). Sovremennik. (In Russian).
Denisova, I. (1971). The Life-Giving Spring: On the Work of Writer A.V. Kalinin. Don, 9, 184–192. (In Russian).
Dyrdin, A. A. (2016). Water/River Chronotope in Early Works of A. Platonov. Philological Class, 4, 62–68. (In Russian).
Fedorov, L. (1959). Reading Anatoly Kalinin: On the writer's work and his novel “The Harsh Field”. Neva, 4, 194–199. (In Russian).
Gopalakrishnan, B., & Aravind, B. R. (2025). Traversing Frontiers: An Exploration of Boundaries and Resilience in Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. Journal of Frontier Studies, 10(1), 106–119. https://doi.org/10.46539/jfs.v10i1.600
Gorbachev, V. V. (1982). The Word Fights Back: On the Prose of Anatoly Kalinin. In The Word Fights Back: On the Civic Nature of Literature (pp. 40–67). Sovremennik. (In Russian).
Gumilev, L. N. (2001). Ethnogenesis and the Earth's Biosphere. Kristall. (In Russian).
Gura, A. V. (2012). Dog. In N. I. Tolstoy (Ed.), Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary in 5 Volumes (Vol. 5, pp. 93–95). Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya. (In Russian).
Kalinin, A. V. (2016). The Harsh Field. In Collected Works in Eleven Volumes (Vol. 3, pp. 9–110). Omega Publisher. (In Russian).
Karpova, V. M. (1976). Anatoly Kalinin: An Essay on His Work. Khudozhestvennaya literatura. (In Russian).
Khoruzhaya, S. V., & Salchinkina, A. R. (2017). The Archetypal Grounds of Friend-or-Foe Antinomy During the Caucasian War. Society: Philosophy, History, Culture, 4, 29–31. https://doi.org/10.24158/fik.2017.4.5 (In Russian).
Kunavin, O. B., & Kunavina, I. I. (2017). The Portrait Problem in Fiction. Current Issues in Philology and Pedagogical Linguistics, 2, 202–207. (In Russian).
Likhachev, D. S. (Ed.). (1997). The Tale of Igor's Campaign. In Library of Ancient Russian Literature: In 20 volumes (Vol. 4, pp. 254–267). Nauka. (In Russian).
Lobova, T. G. (2005). Social-Ontological Justification of the Idea of Brotherhood (in Russian Philosophical Thought) [PhD Thesis]. Omsk State University. (In Russian).
Lotman, Yu. M. (1992). On the content of the concept of “literary fiction”. In Selected Articles: In 3 Volumes (Vol. 1, pp. 203–216). Aleksandra. (In Russian).
Messer, R. (1959). The ideological nature of heroism: On A. Kalinin's book “The Harsh Field”. Don, 12, 149–159. (In Russian).
Ozhegov, S. I. (1984). Dictionary of the Russian Language: Approx. 57,000 words (N. Yu. Shvedova, Ed.). Russian Language. (In Russian).
Plotnikova, A. A. (2009). Crossing the Water. In N. I. Tolstoy (Ed.), Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary in 5 Volumes (Vol. 4, pp. 11–13). Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya. (In Russian).
Propp, V. Y. (2000). The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale. Labyrinth. (In Russian).
Radenkovich, L. (2010). On the Symbolism of Non-Fruitful Trees (Based on South Slavic Material). In N. N. Kazanskiy (Ed.), Ethnobotany: Plants in Language and Culture: Vol. VI. Part 1 (pp. 102‑107). Nauka. (In Russian).
Rudi, A. Sh. (2024). The Frontier Nature of Nostalgic Memory. Journal of Frontier Studies, 9(4), 186–207. https://doi.org/10.46539/jfs.v9i4.565 (In Russian).
Ryblova, M. A. (2006). The Don Brotherhood: Cossack Communities on the Don in the 16th – First Third of the 19th Century. Volgograd State University Press.. (In Russian).
Salchinkina, A. R. (2018). The binary opposition of “us and them” in historical narrative: The image of the highlander in the consciousness of the Cossacks during the Caucasian War of the 19th century. In Social and Humanitarian Bulletin: All-Russian Collection of Scientific Papers (Vol. 22, pp. 25–27). Krasnodar Center for Scientific and Technical Information. (In Russian).
Shishkina, N. A. (1981). From the Heart: Reflections on the Pages of A. V. Kalinin's Books. Rostov-on-Don Publishing House. (In Russian).
Sholokhov, M. A. (1985). And Quiet Flows the Don. In Collected Works in Eight Volumes (Vol. 1). Khudozhestvennaya literatura. (In Russian).
Sklyarevskaya, G. N. (1993). Metaphor in the Language System. Nauka. (In Russian).
Toporov, V. N. (1994). The River. In S. A. Tokarev (Ed.), Myths of the Peoples of the World. Encyclopedia in Two Volumes (Vol. 2, pp. 374–376). Russian Encyclopedia; Dealer; Rusich. (In Russian).
Turner, F. J. (2009). The Frontier in American History. Ves Mir. (In Russian).
Tvardovsky, A. T. (1977). Vasily Terkin. In Collected Works in Six Volumes (Vol. 2, pp. 159–332). Khudozhestvennaya literatura. (In Russian).
Vinogradova, L. N., & Levkievskaya, E. E. (2004). Window. In N. I. Tolstoy (Ed.), Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary in 5 Volumes (Vol. 3, pp. 534–539). Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya. (In Russian).
Volodina, T. V., & Lobach, V. A. (2010). Mythological status and ritual functions of the forest in Belarusian folk medicine. In N. N. Kazanskiy (Ed.), Ethnobotany: Plants in Language and Culture: Vol. VI. Part 1 (pp. 190–199). Nauka. (In Russian).
Zlobin, S. (1959). On A. Kalinin's Novel “The Harsh Field”. Noviy mir, 7, 211–225. (In Russian).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.