Kliukina Daria Aleksandrovna – bachelor’s student, National Research Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod, Institute of Philology and Journalism, Department of Foreign Literature
In the novel The Bear, E. Krivak reinterprets the generic conventions of post-apocalyptic literature, depicting not a struggle for the survival of civilization but a voluntary return of the world and its characters to a primordial state. This rejection of anthropocentrism is manifested, in particular, in the ideological conflict between father and daughter. While the father remains a bearer of past cultural models, clinging to ritual as a means of preserving them, the daughter consistently rejects these models as vestiges, merging ever more fully with the natural world. The present article examines this generational conflict through the lens of ritual – more precisely, through the characters’ differing attitudes toward ritual and the degree of their reflection on its meaning. The culmination of this trajectory is the father’s death and the final collapse of an anthropocentric worldview, while the concluding act of transformation is marked by the transfer of narrative agency from the human to the bear after the heroine’s death. Thus, the article argues that the world of Krivak’s novel is governed not by linear degradation but by cyclical renewal. The death of human civilization is not an endpoint but a stage after which life continues in a new turn of the cycle, one in which the human being is no longer the apex of the cosmic order.
A. Krivak; post-apocalyptic novel; ritual; death; mythological worldview; post-anthropocene