Pagan and bible beginning in the creative work of B.Shulz and F.Kafka

Abstract

Reguretskaya Ekaterina Mikhailovna – post-graduate student of Baltic Federal University of I.Kant. 

Modern literature pays great attention to the study of biblical and pagan aspects of the classical works of the twentieth century.

Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz – two classics of modernity, residents of “Republic of dreams”, if to use a beautiful metaphor of Schultz, were from Jewish families lived in a multicultural and multilingual Austro-Hungarian Empire absorbed with best achievements of the Austrian culture. As noted by J. Updike: «Kafka and Schulz – two unremarkable man, born in the backyard of once powerful empire, took a bite at the same apple myth, but from different sides». Both were able to transform the insightful observation in prophecy, describing the dreams and nightmares as precisely as if they were facts of life, both shed light on human nature and witnessed history, complementing each other. I. Klekh rightly observes certain «commonness» of their creative method, stressing the importance for the two writers’ motif of transformation, transformation, mutual penetration of books and worlds.

Shulz’s «fairy tale», his myth-making, guided by its own laws, “mythological” rules, which, unlike Kafka, is not «mythological» of closeness exclusively on internal self-perception.

Key words: Bible, myth, mythimage, Kafka, Shultz.