‘Intuition of the radiant emptiness’ in the novel ‘Max’ and in the poetry books ‘The Light Behind the Trees’ and ‘The Sea, Today’ by A. Makushinsky

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze the influence of Buddhism on the ideological component and poetics of A. Makushinsky’s novel “Max” and poetry books “The Light Behind the Trees” and “The Sea, Today”. In the novel “Max” the protagonist follows the path of spiritual transformation. The goal of this path is a state in which reality will be seen as it is – genuine, that is, empty, and not illusory, hidden behind matter and various forms. The image of the illusory reality generated by the affected human mind in the novel is associated with the motives of fuzziness, confusion, absence. Characters and items in “Max” have a phantom status. The hero approaches the desired state through the desire for a “fixed point”, for presence in the present time, for complete objectivity, for pure consciousness. The chronotope of the novel is conventional: the spatial loci of “Max” do not have clear boundaries and are similar to each other; the past, present and future are mixed and tend to a single point – here-and-now. In poetry books, as well as in the novel, there is, in the words of the author, «an intuition of the radiant emptiness». A. Makushinsky’s poems are meditative and are tuned to capture the emptiness and silence hidden behind the words and phenomena of reality.