• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.265-293
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• 2011

This study focused on the literary world of T. Tolstaya, a Russian writer who takes a crucial position in contemporary Russian literature, drawing upon the wrier's a couple of short stories. 'Youth' is a key motive encompassing all works of Tolstaya, so that it becomes the poetic keynote among her literary works. In order to examine such distinctions of the main characters' world awareness in their youth as shown in Tolstaya's literary works, Chapter 2 of this paper paid a special attention to the analyse of her representative works such as "Sitting on a Golden Terracing Stone" and "Meeting with a Bird", and expressed potential implications of youth with mimetic imagination for her. For Tolstaya, youth is perceived as a paradise but original imagination of youth gradually fades away in adult and ends up with a lost paradise. This is why Tolstaya uses poetic means based on nostalgia for youth like paradise and literary motto for recovery of imagination in youth. In this regard, this study particularly examined the retrospective prologue resisting the power of time as well as different fictional characters living in her own fantastic world. As a result, this study draws a conclusion that such longing and nostalgia for youth and lost paradise as delineated by Tolstaya through retrospective prologue and characters speak for an existential speculation that explores any profound implication of afflictions in reality of human life, rather than focusing on the painful reality of human life which consists of honest dialogues with realities like 'darkness' and 'pain.' In addition, this study, complying with Zolotonosov's ideas which deal with and define Tolstaya's literary works as a shabby and humble box invisibly containing a full wealth of precious jewels inside, sheds a new light on the writer's literary world.