The Problem of the Relationship between Faith and Religion in Ma Boyong's Novel "The Zoo at the End of the World"

The authors analyze the relationship between faith and religion in the novel "Zoo at the End of the World" by contemporary Chinese writer Ma Boyong. The study focuses on the poetics and thematic aspects of the work, focusing on the functions of fairytale and adventurous elements in constructing a plot based on the protagonist's journey to Inner Mongolia in the early 20th century to restore Christian churches destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion. The subject of the study: methods for formulating and addressing the spiritual and religious issues of Chinese society in the early 20th century. The aim of the study is to identify what narrative techniques based on the traditional fairytale narrative of travel were used to create the story, the functions of miraculous elements, and their connection to magical realism techniques, as well as to identify the specifics of the spiritual life of multi-confessional China during the difficult period of the collapse of its imperial history. The article demonstrates the work's place in the metamodern line of contemporary Chinese literature, employing the arsenal of techniques from previous postmodernist prose. At the same time, it not only raises serious issues of the relationship between faith and religion in China at the beginning of the 20th century but also evokes deep and sincere emotions toward the characters of the novel. Drawing on the events of the novel, the authors substantiate the idea that faith in goodness and supreme justice takes precedence over the formal demands of any given religion. The writer's idea is that at the core of any religion should lie sincere love for humanity and the world around us, the ability to forgive rather than punish, and the ability to live and work for one's faith and dreams. The author uses a comprehensive approach, including narrative analysis (fairytale journey motifs, adventurous elements), historical analysis (identification and interpretation of the historical moment reflected in the work), aesthetic and ethical analysis of the problematic, and a comparative-typological method for determining the synthesis of features of various literary movements. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time, the problems of the relationship between faith and religion, reflected in Ma Boyong’s novel “The Zoo at the End of the World,” become the object of a special analysis in Russian Sinology: faith and spirituality in the context of the novel are considered not as synonyms for religiosity, but as its alternative. The problem of the relationship between faith and religion in Ma Boyong’s novel “The Zoo at the End of the World” becomes the center of attraction for all formal and semantic elements of the work, defining the general vector of movement of the author’s ideas of a complex metamodern text, combining elements of representation of traditional literary forms and the problems of choosing the true faith in the modern multireligious world.