NATIONAL IDENTITY IN COMPARATIVE RESEARCH (OF LITHUANIAN AND RUSSIAN LITERATURES)

This article opens up with an account of topicality of the issue of national identity in humanities. The subject of the analysis are some contemporary trends (methods and methodological approaches) of the research of this problem. Sharing the point of view that literature is a relevant data source for a research into national identity (M.K. Popova) including both contemporary Russian and Lithuanian literary critical interpretations, the comparative analysis of several works of Russian and Lithuanian postmodernist fiction (Ven. Erofeyev, R. Gavelis, J. Kunčinas) is presented in this article with an intention of representing national variants of the identity “engi­neering” in the Soviet society of 1960–1980-es. The object of the analysis is the artistic function of capital cities: Moscow and Vilnius. The analysis is focused on correlations of architectural metaphors of state power and ethnocultural specificities, and particularly, the projection of the Soviet identification space on personal national identity. It follows from this research that the criteria of national identification within an artwork are transformed into signs of cultural space; this process mostly appears as an ethnocultural identification, which fact may be interpreted as a compensatory and protective reaction to the crisis of the “Soviet” identity. This analysis of works of two different literatures enables to specify the notion of the cultural component in comparative literary research and to reassess the correlation of the globalist and nationalist tendencies in the perspective of studying the types of national identity in the European literature and culture.