Наумлюк, М. В. Региональная литература Кольского Севера XX-XXI века в аспекте идентичности и мультикультурности. Страницы истории и современность / М. В. Наумлюк ; М-во образования и науки Рос. Федерации, Мурм. гос. гуманитар. ун-т. - Мурманск, 2013.

gulping with water and fuel oil, frost bitten and burnt, PQ-17 caravan is however coming to us!” [Pikul, 2004, p. 135]. MacLean’s novel describes in bright colours the severest conditions that an English convoy had to endure during its winter journey. With heavy feelings the author narrates about the death of each ship and seamen heroism without forgetting to mention important details and fixing the time minute-by-minute. These books are also united by poetic intonation that makes the reader feel so lemnity of the situation, grandiosity of the deed, the highest sense of every lost life. Endlessness and silence of the ocean, the titanic battle in its waters resem ble “Iliad” by Homer. In the both novels the musical grand finale finishes the death theme. It is the minute of silence which transforms tragedy into the legend. This is the de scription of seamen who escaped from bombs but have frozen in the conditions of extreme north. Alistair Stuart MacLean: “The Adventure was torpedoed just before sunset. Three-quarters of the ship’s company escaped in lifeboats along with twenty survivors picked up from the Planters. A month later the frigat Esher found them, in three lifeboats tied line ahead, off the bitter, iron coast of the Bear Island, heading steadily north. The Captain, alert and upright, was still sitting in the stem-sheets, empty eye- sockets searching for some lost horizon, a withered claw locked to the tiller. The rest were sitting or lying about the boats, one actually standing, his arm cradled around the mast, and all with shrunken sun-blackened lips drawn back in the hideous mirth. The log-book lay beside the Captain, empty: all had frozen to death on the first night... The Barrier is the region of the great silence, the seas of incredible peace, so peaceful, so calm, so cold that they may be there yet, the dead who cannot rest” [Maclean A.S. “H. M. S. Ulysses” URL: http://www. e-reading.org.ua] . Last pages of the Pikul’s novel - is a requiem to the lost ships, sounding already in eternity: “The Ships, as well as people, died differently... Others met death in solemn silence, only then the long ominous rumble was heard from un der the water, there were the heated boilers which have not sustained the em braces of a cold blew up. Other ships plaintively groaned by sirens, their metal lic constructions collapsed with a roar; the pulled down ships shifted in the sky their masts - as the hands for agonal handshake. And then the ships buried in abyss with a roar, almost furiously having sparkled with “eyes” - the glasses of the cabins... Drowned ships of PQ-17 have emerged on a surface right after the war; shades of the ships as the phantoms have begun to hesitate on horizon, without going to the communication, without knocking by cars... Caravan PQ-17 wanders at ocean among freakish icebergs, the dead ships slowly drift on the black water” [Pikul, 2004, c. 153]. We notice brevity, almost asceticism of MacLean and Pikul images, their emotional power and picturesque expressive ness. The metaphor of the ship and its command, doomed to eternal wanderings 90