Skvortsova E.L., Lutskiy A.L. Opposition Between Personality and Society in Creative Work of Abe Kobo and Mikhail Bulgakov

Abstract: The article is devoted to the problem of the opposition between personality and society in literature based on the example of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel 'Heart of a Dog' and Abe Kobo's short story 'Tinnyusia'. The emphasis is made on the socio-cultural environment when those works were written because they were written at critical epochs of the paradigm shift accompanied with the total chaos of values. Those were the periods of Russia's becoming socialist USSR and Japan's 'turn' to demilitarization and democratization after the Second World War. In both cases psychology and behavior of people during social cataclysms were viewed and interpreted by Abe and Bulgakov through fantastic allegory and grotesque. In their research the authors of the present article have applied the empirical-hermeneutic method, i.e. the method of the correct description and interpretation of particular sources, as well as the dialectic method combined with the complementarity principle. This article is the first one in the history of Russian literary studies and Japanese studies to compare and analyze creative work of Abe Kobo and Mikhail Bulgakov from the cultural, sociological and philosophical points of view. For the first time in the academic literature the authors have also referred to foreign philosophical, socio-psychological and cultural sources including original Japanese texts. 

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