GENRE SPECIFICITY OF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES ABOUT RUSSIAN MOVEMENTS BY E. POSELYANIN
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2021-1-95-103
Introduction. Evgeny Poselyanin, a well-known publicist and spiritual writer in pre-revolutionary Russia, having traveled the path of doubts in faith and received a spiritual revival in Optina Pustyn, became a participant in the discussion between the intelligentsia and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 20th century. The ecclesiastical nature of E. Poselyanin’s aesthetic consciousness determined the main task of all his work, which was to reproduce and transmit the spiritual world of Russian Orthodoxy. Aim and objectives. The work of the famous spiritual writer and publicist of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Evgeny Nikolaevich Poselyanin, completely forgotten for several decades of the Soviet era, requires «rehabilitation» and serious scientific research. Material and methods. The article examines the collection of biographies of E. Poselyanin «Russian ascetics of the 19th century» (1900 edition). The research is written in the mainstream of historical poetics. Results and discussion. Poselyanin’s literary activity reflected the most important spiritual and cultural searches of his contemporaries and artistic and aesthetic tendencies of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Religious revival of the early 20th century led to a shift in boundaries within Russian culture, during which there was a convergence and mutual influence of theology, philosophy, science with fiction, which was reflected in the transformation of traditional artistic and aesthetic forms. In the work of E. Poselyanin, one can trace how church themes and Orthodox content are clothed in literary forms characteristic of secular literature and departing from strict genre canons, which are becoming more plastic genre formations open for the expression and transmission of the experience of spiritual life by modern man. Conclusion. The book by E. Poselyanin «Russian ascetics of the 19th century» is a document of Russian spiritual life in the 18th – 19th centuries. In this collection of biographical sketches, the traditionalism of the life of the saint is eroded by genre innovations: the inclusion of structural elements from other artistic and journalistic church genres (paterics, sermons, church history) and fictionalized, memoir and biographical prose popular in secular literature.
Keywords: genre, biography, biographical sketch, memoirs, lives, literary portrait
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Issue: 1, 2021
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: PROBLEMS AND POETICS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE XIX–XXI CENTURIES
Pages: 95 — 103
Downloads: 574