Tonkaya Nit: Summary And Analysis

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Neither can be the landscapes of Tonkaya Serebristaya Nit’ (2015). The novel opens with a chapter, in which a girl (likely, a protagonist) talks to her grandfather: they sit close to a lighthouse in a strange place, which resembles Aides. However, the boats with the souls were coming up to the surface of the lake instead of heading down into a cave:

“There was fire, trapped inside a dome of coloured glass. The light was visible even from the other side of the Ghostly border, and no one could lose his way. The boats were raising hither.”
“Boats without sails?”
“They rose like steam from the bottom, through all dimensions. In each boat, there was one soul. I have never seen two souls together!” (Zherebtsova 4)

The landscape around them is uncanny and ghastly, but the heroes do not pay attention to it. Bright-orange sun, flaming balls of dreams that fly in the air, flashing triangles, which turn into fish, all of those are familiar to the girl and her grandfather. At the end of the chapter, the grandfather Atollah walks away with a dead dog, which nevertheless accompanies him, and the girl jumps into the depth of the lake. Such an opening invites to read the entire novel through the lens of the surreal, to look for the mystical in everyday life. The real landscapes are scary and uncanny as well since most of the events occur …show more content…

But on top of reality Zherebtsova adds a layer of mysticism and metamorphoses: the real and the imaginative worlds merge in one. By doing so, Zherebtsova blurs the boundaries between reality and dreams, between past and present. This means that if the violent and inhumane present can be understood at all, it can be done only through the past, through the history. This can be best seen in the chapter “Doch’ Proroka" (The Daughter of the

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