| Abstract [eng] |
MYTHICAL IMAGINATION IN JOLITA SKABLAUSKAITE’S COLLECTION OF NOVELLAS AND SHORT STORIES “TREČIASIS TŪKSTANTMETIS (THE THIRD MILLENIUM)” SUMMARY This Master’s thesis aims to determine how Jolita Skablauskaitė’s mythical imagination is manifested in her collection of novellas and short story collections, The Third Millennium (lith. Trečiasis tūkstantmetis) (2000). There are studies of J. Skablauskaitė’s work, but only a few fragments of her work have been studied from the perspective of mythocriticism, and the collection of novellas stories and short stories, The Third Millennium, has been largely overlooked by literary scholars. The unexplored nature of this author’s work, and especially the collection of novellas and short stories, and the new perspective of the research – through the prism of myth-criticism – are the reasons for the novelty and topicality of this final thesis. The theoretical approach is supported by the theory of myth, archetype and iteration by M. Eliade, C. G. Jung, and the research on the concept of the ancient Lithuanian mythological world by G. Beresnevičius, N. Vėlius and L. Būgienė. The main components of the mythical imagination – myth, archetype, iteration, coexistence of real and unreal elements – are identified. Since Jolita Skablauskaitė was not only a writer but also an artist, who illustrated her own books, the main tools of the research on the intermediality of I. Melnikova were used for the study of the illustrations and written text. The analytical part of the study examines the expression of J. Skablauskaitė’s mythical imagination in the novellas and short stories of the collection The Third Millennium. The chthonic spacetime of the long short stories and short stories, the various mythological creatures acting in that spacetime and determining the fate of the protagonists were investigated, with a focus on the female protagonists of the works. It was found that the author created the chthonic spacetime using mythical logic – the protagonists’ encounters with various creatures occur at a finite time – at sunrise, sunset or at night, the spatial structure is associated with the forest, bodies of water, mysterious buildings. The mythical creatures appearing in novellas and short stories fall into several large groups: spirits in various forms, disease as a projection of a reptile, animal-like creatures-spirits, creatures with features of ancient Baltic mythology and Greek mythology, and the archetypal image of an old man. The protagonists of the works have a mythical ability to transform, to migrate between the worlds of the living and the dead, to conjure or cast spells, and many of the characters are supernatural in nature and appearance. The mythical nature of the protagonists created by Jolita Skablauskaitė is also reflected in the names given to them, which are associated with ancient and Baltic mythology. The analytical part of the study also includes an analysis of the illustrations that complement the written works, in order to identify the relationship between the written text and the illustrations, and at the same time to investigate how the illustrations expand the mythical stratum of the written texts. |
