THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF KHALED HOSSEINI’S NOVELS IN THE POETICS OF TRAUMA AND MEMORY

Abstract

The article examines the distinctiveness of the novels «The Kite Runner», «A Thousand Splendid Suns», and «And the Mountains Echoed» as an integral authorial project. Within this project, personal memory and historical catastrophe form a single compositional mechanism of meaning. The analysis focuses on narrative strategies for representing trauma, mechanisms of ethical choice, and the ways in which individual destiny is linked to collective memory through symbols, chronotope, and culturally marked vocabulary. The study draws on the Russian-language editions of the novels, as well as a corpus of Russian-language critical and scholarly articles that makes it possible to compare plot architectonics, modes of focalization, and the semantic fields of key characters. It is shown that the transition from a retrospective confession-based narrative to mosaic polyphony is accompanied by an increasing complexity of composition, while preserving such stable invariants as the ethics of responsibility, the motif of expiation, and intergenerational connection.