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Abstract: The paper investigates the system of characters in I. Boyashov’s novel The Tankman or ‘The White Tiger’. The book is part of a new trend in Russian military-historical fiction of the early 21st century. A review of academic and critical literature on the topic enabled the author to compile the list of books belonging to the trend and describe its genre specificity, as well as estimate the place of Boyashov’s novel in it. Critics note a complex merge of a fantastic plot and historically accurate description of the realities of the Great Patriotic War. Literary researchers comment on the mystical fantastic component of The Tankman and multiple intentional deviations of its poetics from the canonic features of military-historical fiction, the prevailing opinion being that The Tankman or ‘The White Tiger’ is a fantasy novel. The paper attempts to explore the poetics of the book and disclose its genre specificity, focusing mainly on mythological and fantastic means of representation of the author’s concept. The author investigates and evaluates the degree of historical accuracy and attention to detail in Boyashov’s depicting the War, analyses the plot of the book, and outlines the principal characters. Boyashov is found to have constructed two parallel plots: a chronical military-historical plot modelling the second half of the Great Patriotic War and archetypal mythological plot of the duel of the Hero (the tankman Naydenov) and the Beast (the White Tiger tank). The principle of duality is also laid at the basis of the system of characters, where historical and fictional characters, typical of a historical novel, are portrayed alongside the fairy-tale Hero and hyperbolic parodies on some historical myths clichés. Boyashov created a postmodernistic historical novel, which attempts at ideological and emotional re-evaluation of the military-historical discourse of the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries.

About the author(s) :

Aleksandr M. Lobin
Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University named after I. N. Ulyanov (Ulyanovsk, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6885-0963

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 11.01.2023; date of publication: 30.03.2023

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