Leon aven Surmelian’s “98.6°”
Summary
Arpi S. Muradyan
The novel of L. Z. Surmelian “98.6°” that we are going to discuss in this article has been published in the USA in 1950, and in Armenian – in 2005, in Yerevan by Aram Arsenyan’s translation. The title implies human body’s normal temperature, and the novel is the artistic reflection of the writer’s illness and the process of his painful treatment of four years.
Practicing literary criticism’s contemporary achievements and making synthetic analysis of some facts of writer’s biography, the author of the article substantiates that despite the absence of Armenian entourage and Armenian characters, the novel is psychological – autobiographical by its genre. The novel’s central character – Irishman Daniel Moore’s prototype is the author himself, who has been in some marginal existential state, but overcame the death threat with stubborn commitment. The novel’s structure, actions, the systems of characters and images performing them, artistic peculiarities are examined with the wide application of thesis of the author’s theoretical work “Techniques of Prose: Measure and Madness”.