The function and mission of the “little man” in Bulat Okudzhava’s novel Poor Avrosimov

Abstract

In the beginning of the article we correlate Okudzhava’s story about the creative history of his novel (“invention” of the scrivener’s image) with the writer’s statements about Decembrism, which allows us to solve the following tasks: 1) to restore the main creative impulses of the writer; 2) to characterize the formation of his cognitive strategy, which covers the mythologized past and the tragic events of the Soviet era; 3) to clarify a number of definite functions of the “little man” that have not yet been noted by the interpreters of the novel; 4) to highlight the mission of the “little man” that reveals Okudzhava’s ethical principle. We consider the artist’s inconsistency in stylizing the thinking of the “little man” (the lead character and his psychological counterpart – the narrator) as a means of involving the contemporary reader in a dispute about the conflicts of the past inherited by the 20th century. We show the fundamental novelty of the embodiment of the Decembrist theme in the mirror of the perception of literary critics of the 1970s, who remained in the grip of the myth of the first Russian revolutionaries in its two varieties (official or alternative, cultivated by freethinkers), which interfered with the proper perception of the status of the “little man” next to a historic figure. Our task is to show that the merciful ethics of the artist, compassionate to the sufferer, soften Okudzhava’s civic intransigence towards the ideology of Pestel, whose state utopia became a Soviet reality; thus, we substantiate the regularity of the election of the “little man”, who himself needs indulgence, to the role of the spokesman for Pushkin’s commandment of “mercy to the fallen”. We trace the bold development in Okudzhava’s novel of the classical tradition of the “little man” experiencing his own drama of the “weak heart”. The echoes of Avrosimov’s fantasies about saving Pestel with Pushkin’s poem “Deep in Siberia’s mines...” are comprehended in the article as a sublimation of the author’s pain about the tragic fate of the Decembrists.

Keywords

• okudzhava
• “little man”
• pestel
• decembrist myth
• pushkin
• poem “deep in siberia’s mines…”