The Wendish Research Exchange - Barthold, Willie W.: Myth, Nature, and Gender in Jurij Koch's Wišnina/Der Kerschbaum (1984). New Approaches to Analyzing...

Lětopis Abstract 2024 : Barthold, Willi W.: Myth, Nature, and Gender in Jurij Koch’s Wišnina/Der Kirschbaum (1984). New Approaches to Analyzing Narrative World Creation in Modern Sorbian Literature

Myths are omnipresent in the Sorbian imagination: Sorbian literary texts very frequently draw on myths to generate their narrative worlds, ranging from characters from well-known Sorbian folktales to Slav deities or classical mythology. By analysing Jurij Koch’s novella, Wišnina/Der Kirschbaum (1984), this article shows how Sorbian literature’s narrative instrumentalization of myths is intertwined with constructing human-nature-relationships and gender hierarchies. Following this argument, Sorbian narrative texts not only use myths to conceive a Sorbian self-image and identity in contrast to its ‘Other’, but also to negotiate the Sorbs’ position vis-à-vis nature, as well as notions of ‘the natural’, masculinity, and femininity. An analytical perspective that is focused on myth, nature, and gender as defining, and interwoven, dimensions of Sorbian narrative world creation thus reveals how Jurij Koch’s novella concentrates on establishing a version of Sorbian identity that is based on mythologically legitimized ‘rootedness’, close proximity to nature, and traditional conceptions of gender.