Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Dec 2016)
The Category of Place in Émigré Consciousness: With Reference to Vladimir Varshavsky
Abstract
The author considers the evolution of the concept of “one’s own place” in Russian literature through the prism of works by N. V. Gogol, F. M. Dostoyevsky, and young writers of «the first wave» of Russian emigration. The article focuses on the meaning of Demons and Crime and Punishment which suggest deep parallels between the willful reduction of life (suicide) and the reduction of one’s own place in the world (symbolical departure to the outland) that anticipated a number of themes of the literature of the Russian abroad. The author focuses on the special role of a cycle of works of D. I. Chizhevsky devoted to the criticism of ethical formalism, the issue of doppelgangers and Dostoyevsky’s creative work that gave a comprehensive analysis of the concept of “one’s own place” in the ethical and religious system of the Russian classic. The article emphasises the special role of the motif of “one’s own place” in the ideological and artistic system of V. Varshavsky and his essential contribution to the renovation of this discourse. The article explores separate events and phenomena in the history of the Russian dispersion (“exodus”, Russian Montparnasse, Parisian Note, World War II, etc.) as the most important stages of the émigré search for one’s own place in the world are explored. The author aims to show the special role of the category of place in émigré consciousness and in the works of writers of the Russian abroad, to note a special contribution of literary criticism of the Russian emigration to the study of the ethical and ontological “issue of places”. Using the comparative and hermeneutical methods, the author traces the deep communication of the émigré concept of “one’s own place” with the tradition of Russian classical literature. Following his analysis, the author concludes that there was an essential transformation of the concept of one’s own place in the literature of Russian emigration accompanying the massive exodus, the loss of homeland, the point of support, and the place in the world.
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