The Fictional World of Simon Mawer's Novels: Genre Model and Thematic Constants

This study examines the genre-and-thematic model of Simon Mawer's fictional world. A contemporary British author and laureate of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Mawer (1948–2025) creates a distinctive genre hybrid that oscillates between the classical historical novel, historiographic metafiction, and fictionalized biography. The article traces Mawer's literary career, briefly characterizes his major works (Chimera, A Jealous God, Mendel's Dwarf, The Gospel of Judas, The Fall, Swimming to Ithaca, The Glass Room, Ancestry), and outlines his genre strategy, marked by an increasingly prominent documentary dimension. The analysis identifies several thematic constants: the individual-family past versus universal history, self-formation in the context of world history, cultural and national self-identity, and personal and national trauma and memory. The methodology combines traditional comparative-historical, contrastive-comparative, and biographical approaches with intermedial analysis. The scientific novelty lies in the insufficient coverage of Mawer's figure and legacy in Russian literary criticism, despite his being one of the most prominent English writers at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries working with historiosophical themes in novelistic form. Mawer's work exemplifies a genre synthesis characteristic of postmodern poetics. The findings can be used in further research on the history of the novel genre, as well as in university courses on foreign literature and literary theory. The proposed model also offers a productive framework for more detailed analyses of individual novels, allowing them to be situated within the context of Mawer's authorial method, artistic strategy, and worldview. The conclusion argues that Mawer's fictional world possesses a deliberate architectonics and coherent conceptual design. Key features include: biographism; a dual temporal plane; a plot organized around solving a mystery of the personal and/or national past; an intellectual protagonist; a stable spatio-temporal continuum centred on toposes sacred to the protagonist's personal history (the Mediterranean, Italy, and the United Kingdom), all revolving around the events and consequences of World War II; and the myth-motif of an "eternal return home" in search of one's "roots" and one's own self.