Личность и пустота, или эволюционные архетипы литературы

Abstract

A person and the emptiness, or evolutionary archetypes in literature

Initiated and approved by Alexander Pushkin, Russian literature of the “Golden Age” has been arising and forming as aristocratic and therefore elite and focused on personality (i.e. personalitycentric). Personalitycentric ideology stood to be the Russian literature’s cultural code that assumes the priority of the origin of thinking person over social unconsciousness. The protagonist of such literature is a “alienated person” (Chatsky, Onegin, Pechorin) who is a character of high level personalitycentric valence. During the 19th century the Russian literature has changed its focus from Personalitycentrism to Sociocentrism therefore having changing its protagonist to a “little man”, “humiliated and insulted”. He has become the leading but not the main character, though acting in contrast to “alienated persons”. Obviously, in its vertex achievements the Russian literature coincided to “alienated”. Starting from the Soviet period of Russian history in the 20th century Sociocentrism has become the dominating main tendency and opposed to the traditions of the “Golden Age” turned to be a mainstream that afterwards has split into two main branches: the soviet and the antisoviet (dissident) literature. Dissident literature has been cultivating Individocentrism in oppose to Sociocentrism. Individocentrism initiated an intellectual game-literature. Today the Russian literature has lost its elitist features and its world leadership at once. Emptiness that was treated as a genetically determined nostalgia for the Personalitycentrism has become its cross-cutting character image. This fact is justified by the analysis of the novel Chapaev and Emptiness by Pelevin. The key thesis of the article is as follows: the global achievements of any literature (here it is about the Russian literature) are strictly related to a humanitarian law of the Personalitycentrism: the personalitycentric valence of the front-rank literatures is higher than the personalitycentric valence of the epoch they have been arising from.