WORLD ESCHATOLOGY IN THE NOVEL «CASSANDRA’S BRAND» BY CHINGIZ AITMATOV

World eschatology in Aitmatov’s late fiction “Cassandra’s Brand” (1996) addresses the problem of death expectation of mankind at the genetic level in the context of a worldwide catastrophe. In this case writer’s transition to rationalistic eschatology acting within the framework of secular culture, anthropogenic factors and science-like phenomena, is of great interest along with mythological and Abrahamic eschatology.

First of all, it is necessary to distinguish the motive of dystopia through analyzing similar features of eschatology, dystopia (and futurology) as specific forms of attitude to the mode of future, and to disсern traditional features of this literary genre as well. For example, a geneticist from space, who calls himself as a space monk, is perceived by society as the antichrist, attempting a sacrilege against the sacrament of procreation and the divine commandment “Be fruitful and multiply”; an undesirable brand on the pregnant women’s forehead is considered as a mark of the beast, since laser exposure in folk culture is perceived as an ability to control people’s psyche and soul. In the background, the novel illustrates the dystopia model of a technocratic state in which inhuman experiments in creating an artificial human, lynching, mass wars and murders occur.

Further, the motive of the “noosphere” is considered, which interprets the genesis of world eschatology as world’s harmony destruction and division of the world mind into the antinomy of space and chaos, where the first epitomizes the natural beginning of nature and animals, meanwhile the chaos is relating to social destructive actions. The impossibility of constructing a noospheric, cosmopolitan consciousness assumes its evolutionary completion, the end of the world, according to Aitmatov. Aitmatov’s world-building in his novel largely resembles the theories of Teilhard de Chardin, Nikolai Fedorov, Vladimir Vernadsky.

In the end, the final image of world eschatology is devoted to the motive of the universal death, endangering both human existence and all nature, the cosmic universe as a whole. In the novel for the first time, besides the suicide of the protagonist, Aitmatov describes the mass suicide of whales, as radars of cosmic intelligence, predicting the world’s catastrophe. The aspect of the forced death of a prophet-man as a potential death for society is also analyzed Abstracts. World eschatology in Aitmatov’s late fiction “Cassandra’s Brand” (1996) addresses the problem of death expectation of mankind at the genetic level in the context of a worldwide catastrophe. In this case, of great interest is the writer’s transition, along with mythological and Abrahamic eschatology, to rationalistic eschatology, which acts within the framework of secular culture, anthropogenic factors and science-like phenomena.

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