On the topic of the beginning of existential prose by M. Yu. Lermontov

Moskvin Georgy Vladimirovich PhD in Philology Associate professor, Department of History of Russian Literature, M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University 119992, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Leninskie Gory, 1, str. 51 georgii_moskvin@mail.ru Other publications by this author

In 1828, in the year of Lermontov's first poems, Pushkin wrote "skeptical couplets", as the poet called his poems in a letter to E. Khitrovo — "A gift in vain, an accidental gift" — published in 1830 and attracted special attention due to their pessimistic pathos ^[1]. In his article on this, M. Altshuller notes "pessimistic sentiments ... doubts about the existence of God," which provoked a poetic response from Metropolitan Filaret. To argue the last thesis, Altshuller resorts to interpreting, we note, not the entire poem, but the first two stanzas, while ignoring the third, in our opinion, entails an incomplete understanding of the meaning of Pushkin's text. The researcher is not alone here — the misconception is repeated in other comments and becomes traditional. Let's take a closer look at the text.

First of all, frequent references to Pushkin's hardships in life cannot and should not serve as a basis for explaining the meaning of his works of art. Secondly, the question: "Life, why are you given to me?" means the confusion of a particular person before the fact of his existence. This is not a pessimistic mood, but an ontological query. There is a difference between "death" and "execution". Death is an inevitable outcome, as if planned; execution is a senseless conversion into Nothing, "fear and awe" of it constitutes the existence of man. "Who has magic power over me / Has he called out of insignificance?" does not mean doubt in God, but the perplexity of a person endowed with passion and intelligence, which are aimless for him. Let us recall the revelation of two years ago by Pushkin: "Like a corpse in the desert I lay / And the voice of God called to me." Without the invocation or invocation of God, all gifts are dead, hence the third stanza ("There is no goal in front of me / The heart is empty, the mind is idle") is not devoted to the emotional strengthening of the second thought — it is a complaint, a need for God, Faith. Therefore, all sorts of speculation and speculation about the godlessness of the poet are absurd and vain. The beginning of the need for faith that fertilizes human life and activity is observed in 1823 — the first crisis ("The desert sower of Freedom", "The Cart of Life", "The Demon"); resumed in 1828 ("A gift in vain..."); then in 1833 in the poem "Autumn" it sounds: "The hulk has moved and Cuts through the waves… Where should we go?" It is interesting that such "crises" are repeated in Pushkin with an interval of five years.

We turned to Pushkin's work in order to show that Lermontov entered Russian poetry during the conflict co-existence in the European cultural consciousness of the worldview of late Romanticism, the philosophy of objective idealism of Hegel and the existentialist concepts of Kierkegaard and other thinkers. In Russian artistic thinking, this combination of such different intellectual systems manifested itself as the ideological and stylistic diversity of Russian literature, primarily in the works of writers of the late 1820s - early 1840s. - the universal responsiveness of Pushkin's work, the Christian asceticism of Gogol's literature, the subject–centered artistic world of Lermontov, the psychological and stylistic searches of early Dostoevsky, mystical experiences V.F. Odoevsky et al. As for the main directions of the post-romantic style discourse of literature, then, summarizing, we will name two of the most noticeable and productive. Throughout European literature, deterministic artistic thinking generates and develops realism, while in Russian literature it is critical. Romanticism, disappearing as the leading stylistic phenomenon of the first third of the XIX century, left its main achievement — a man (a literary hero) as a subject of being — which became the basis for the emergence of various forms of irrationalist tendencies.

In Lermontov's early lyrics, in the period before the beginning of his prose, revelations expressing the young poet's need to explain what exists for man arose in moments of suffering love or feeling the emptiness of existence, when he "aspired to something secret ... to what God promised us" ("N. F. I. ...howl", 1830), or feelings of doom ("Fearing to hope for life...", "Excerpt", 1830), or captivity of hopelessness ("The soul is constrained by itself / Life is hateful, but death is terrible...", "June 1831, 11th day", 1831). In 1829, a problematic began to take shape in Lermontov's poetry, which spread throughout the poet's work, and the theme of the Demon would form its nerve. It seems that Lermontov follows the European tradition (Alfred de Vigny, T. Moore, etc.), but its poetic interpretation reveals a peculiarity that arose, perhaps, under the influence of Pushkin. So, for example, in "The Demon" (1823), the intonation of the last verse "And he did not want to bless anything in all nature" does not indicate that the lyrical subject is impressed by the Demon, but on the contrary, his complete denial (or in Pushkin's 1828 poem "Angel", as a miracle, the inner transformation of the Demon takes place: "I didn't hate everything in the world / I didn't despise everything in the world"). The argument in favor of the stated statement can be the syntactic, compositional organization of the poem – the increasing gradation caused by the enumeration of non-beliefs The demon is abruptly cut off, which forms that specific intonation pattern that we observe in the Onegin stanza. This effect can be called the moment of stress relief, in this case semantic.

In Lermontov's work of 1829-1836, two trends are noticed in the evolution of the demon theme, as well as in the entire artistic conceptosphere of the higher hierarchies. The first consists in endowing opposite entities with signs inherent in them separately, i.e. almost mixing their literary images, for example, in the early poem "Listen, maybe when we leave ..." (1832): "You will be an angel, I will become a demon!" or two editions of the poem "My Demon" (1829 and 1830-1831) with the same beginning: "The gathering of evils is his element...", or in the poem "Azrael" (1831). In early prose, the named principle of non-separation of entities would seem to be preserved. In "Vadim" it is said about Olga: "It was an angel who was banished from paradise for being too sorry for humanity" ^{[2, p. 13]} (Note that Olga is an Angel, like a Demon, being banished from paradise). The hero himself is portrayed repeatedly, like a Demon: beggars "respected in him ... a demon, but not a man" ^{[2, p. 13]}; "Some kind of rabid demon settled in me, but he had no influence on my actions, he only tormented me ^{[2, p. 33]} "A strip of bright light ... fell on her lips, twisted into a terrible, insulting smile..." ^{[2, p. 39]}, "Vadim stood in front of her like Mephistopheles in front of the deceased Margarita..." ^{[2, p. 73]}. And in the second period of Lermontov's work, the above-mentioned technique is still preserved, although it is evolving due to the complication of the ideological motivation of the characters' behavior. It is most clearly manifested in the hero of the "Masquerade" Arbenin, although the style of this image still bears the imprint of the early, so to speak, demonization of the hero: "But sometimes again some kind of hostile spirit / I am carried away into the storm of former days..." ^{[3, p. 307]} Cf.: "Rushing between the smoky clouds / He loves fatal storms..." ("My demon").

The first theme, let's call it the demonization of the hero, ends by the period of mature creativity. The manifestation of the second theme — overcoming the demon in oneself, or a person — begins with the first editions of the poem "The Demon", reaches full development in the lyrics of 1837, in particular, in the poems "Prayer" (1836-1837) and "When the yellowing field is worried" (1837) (The above is confirmed in the work Kiseleva I. A., see: ^[4]) and finally, it culminates in "The Hero of Our Time" (1837-1841).

As for the poem "The Demon", then, as academician N.P. Dashkevich was the first to say, "Lermontov's Demon, "is sick with a tortured soul", seized by a dream even more than all previous poets, is close to the human soul" ^{[5, p. 501]}. V. V. Bugorskaya notes in this regard that "academician N. P. Dashkevich saw the motive for such a statement of the problem in the author's desire" ^{[6, p. 300]} to reveal in his Demon mainly dissatisfaction with his existence, far, however, from complete repentance" ^{[5, p. 510-513]}. V. V. Bugorskaya, commenting on the expression "complete repentance", writes: "In our opinion, Lermontov was interested in the very consideration of the phenomenon of the fall, its causes and the possibility of resolving the conflict with God, the conflict between the Universal Father and the universal son" ^{[6, p. 300]}. Let's add that the very definition of repentance is hardly applicable to a Demon, we are talking about a literary convention. The role of the poem "The Demon" is so great in the literature of the time, significant for its irrational ideas and the restoration of human faith in 1830-1840, that Lev Shestov in his book on Kierkegaard's philosophy, speaking about the spiritual crisis of the Danish philosopher, unexpectedly recalls Lermontov's poem: "Kierkegaard, who composed fiery hymns to suffering, Kierkegaard, who contemptuously rejected earthly joys <...> and immortality, and bliss, and eternity do not wash away the memories of the shame of what he experienced in his final existence, and even less can they replace those joys that he was deprived of. It is as if he repeats Lermontov's demon: "I involuntarily envied the incomplete joy of people" ^{[7, p. 151]}. Shestov's remark can be viewed in the light of Lermontov's stable motive of the literary demon hero's striving for earthly life ("Demon", "Azrael", "Angel of Death") - a motive that has yet to be correctly comprehended, but also, no less importantly, it includes Lermontov's ideas in the modern philosophical paradigm of the poet.

The poem "The Demon", created by Lermontov throughout his creative life, was never finished. Of course, we consider the 6th (1838) or 8th (1839) editions of the poem to be conditionally definitive, but rather staged, in which Lermontov summed up what he had created, but did not put an end to it, as evidenced by the likely attempts to continue it. Thus, in the noted edition of 1839, the finale of part 1 of Faust, the plot of Margarita, triumphs, while the Russian The demon in man has not been overcome. Nevertheless, Lermontov's demon is increasingly powerless over man — a thesis that Lermontov consistently finds artistic arguments to prove. Arguments about the identity, partial or complete, of the images of Lermontov's heroes and the demon essence, mainly concerning Pechorin in The Hero of Our Time, represent aberrations of perception and interpretation of the author's works. We believe that the poem "The Demon" was in Lermontov's work a decisive work in the transition to the main theme of existential prose.

First of all, the content of the terminological combination of existential prose needs to be clarified. The very concept of existence has an all—encompassing character as an ontic, according to Martin Heidegger, the order of existence, VS the ontological (order of being). In the 1840s. The concept of existence became widely used in the philosophical works of Søren Kierkegaard, a phenomenon that reflected the process of humanization of society, i.e., the identification of man and his existence as particularly significant categories of common being. These trends are caused by the socio-historical changes of the late XVIII – early XIX centuries, which led, which is important for our article, to the emergence of anthropocentric philosophical systems (S. Kierkegaard, A. Schopenhauer, etc.) and the emergence of appropriate aesthetic practices.

We have already mentioned above that, for example, Pushkin's "skeptical couplets" "A gift in vain ..." are not caused by doubt in God at all, but by a person's need for faith, overcoming the spiritual crisis of the period of the XVIII – XIX centuries. — a condition that was expressed with special force in the Russian literature of the first decades of the XIX century. Let us note, first of all, the spiritual evolution of Pushkin's work, who, according to I. A. Ilyin's definition, "made his spiritual and moral path from disappointed disbelief to faith and prayer" ^{[8, p. 339]}, the spiritual asceticism of Gogol and Lermontov, in whose work the need for faith clearly and organically combined with artistic talent. Above, we turned to Pushkin's poem "A gift in vain ...", arguing that it does not express doubt about the Creator, it is a complaint and a need for faith. In Gogol's spiritual work, the most important thing is overcoming, or better to say, the absence of fear of Nothing as an existential problem. Thus, V. A. Voropaev writes: "The righteous Christian death of N. V. Gogol became the peak of his spiritual path, the last step of the ladder along which he climbed all his life. Before his death, he confessed twice and partook of the Holy Mysteries, as well as was consecrated with oil. His last words, spoken in full consciousness, were: “How sweet it is to die!”. Behind this, the well-known saying of the holy Apostle Paul, who is close to Gogol's soul, is clearly heard: "... I have a desire to be resolved and be with Christ..." (Phil. 1:23) ^{[9, p. 78]}. On spirituality and the desire for Lermontov's faith, it is appropriate, in our opinion, to cite the statement of S. V. Shuvalov: "Nowhere in Lermontov's work will we find a direct denial of the afterlife; faith in spirituality and, consequently, in the indestructibility of his being is a fact of direct consciousness for him, and therefore he could not abandon this faith, even if I wanted to" ^{[10, pp. 135-164]}.

Of course, human life has always been the subject of literary attention, but the themes and motives that arise in this regard were indirectly related to the main thing — the problem of human existence as a subject of being, valuable and spiritual. The stated definition allows us to identify three thematic and problematic areas of Russian existential literature, the basis of which was Lermontov's work: spiritual (faith), personal (the content of life), social (adaptation to life in the world and society).

The first condition that saturates human existence with meaning, i.e. justifies it, according to modern Lermontov's concepts of existence, is faith, for which there is no temptation, doubt and sin (for the first existentialist, who did not yet know about his significance in the history of philosophy, Seren Kierkegaard, the biblical values of true faith — Abraham and Job - were impeccable). Of course, the young poet was not in any way aware of the theological or philosophical subtleties in matters of faith, however, since adolescence, in addition to poetic immersion in the mysteries of poetry and the mystery of love, he was confused by the traditional idea of the incompatibility of high and low principles of life (for example, "Do not blame me, Almighty...", "Prayer", 1829). Therefore, in Lermontov's work, the idea of not exile, but overcoming the dark essence in oneself, which was defined as the super-task of the poem "The Demon", became urgent.

In Lermontov's prose, this idea was artistically developed in a mature period, in the novel "The Hero of Our Time"; for understanding "Vadim", the thesis about the main contradiction in the hero's soul turned out to be relevant: "He believed in God, but also in the devil" (the scene in the church, the beginning of the riot). In "Princess Ligovskaya", due to stylistic autobiography, the author cannot break away from describing the experience, albeit artistic, but the circumstances of a private person's life (we believe that the main obstacle to creating the work "I want to tell you" was precisely his autobiographical basis). The above concerns exclusively the existential perspective of the development of the image, the interrupted novel is distinguished by an extremely subtle literary analysis of the mores of secular society, the depiction of pictures of the social life of the unprivileged segments of the population, elements of psychological prose. Nevertheless, the work outlines an existential problematic, which is revealed in longing and indecision, i.e. the will to assert the personal being of the first Pechorina. Lermontov, realizing the impossibility of an artistic continuation of the novel, the main thing is to resolve the fatal phenomenon of love defeat in life ^{[11, pp. 179-180]}, stops working on it. Let us repeat that the original ideas of the "Princess Ligovskaya" were included as a source in the ideological composition of the "Hero of Our Time", but did not receive proper artistic generalization.

Russians Russian literature, the issues of human existence (existence, life) in modern historical reality, the spiritual atmosphere of the humanization of society, arose as the leading problematic of the time, such issues as Onegin's Russian melancholy, or the penny goal of Chichikov's poetic path, or the ruined feat of Bashmachkin's ministry, etc. The novel "The Hero of Our Time" was the first prose work in Lermontov's work, in which the ideological and stylistic signs of existential prose manifested themselves. The definition of "the first" is to a certain extent conditional, since it would have been possible to use the expression "and the last experience" if not for two short works: the essay "The Caucasian" and the novel "Stoss", which probably has novel potential.