NATIONAL-HISTORICAL MYTH AND THE WAYS OF ITS INTERPRETING IN THE STORY OF N.S. LESKOV "LEFTY"

Abstract

Traditional interpretations of the story of N.S. Leskov "Lefty" accentuate primarily its etnophilosophical, psychosocial, spiritual and moral problematics, while the Leskov's concept of story remains a poorly studied aspect. The proposed article is devoted to the study of the ideas of writer’s historiosophical ideas, embodied in mythopoetic paradigms from the analyzed work; this approach due to the relevance and novelty of the work.Considering genre–motive and the plot structures of the story, explaining their symbolic and metaphorical functions, the author redesigns of the image- semantic contexts of the national historical myth recreated in the art system of "Lefty". This historiosofical concept is defined as an expression of the original the Leskov view to sustainable cultural opposition "Russia - Europe", "East - West". Writer’s fiction explication of the stable ideologems and mythologems opens up the possibility of a new, universal and philosophical understanding of the meaning of these oppositions. Historical fate of Russia and Europe and related with it contradictions and conflicts are explained through the paradigms of the solar- chthonic myth and central for it objective reality opposition "Chaos - Space". Symbolic representatives of this paradigm in the story become images-doubles, inherently ambivalent: steel flea and the official bureaucracy of St.Petersburg. Drama of the Lefty in the image of Leskov grows, so from socio- psychological and spiritual and moral to deeply existential, as it becomes a reflection of the inner ambivalence being and its fundamental principles.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2014-4-2

Keywords

• poetics
• myth
• historiosophy
• sense born
• symbolic context
• metaphysical consciousness