Article

Name: A guide to the artistic reality Russkaya literatura XX veka: ucheb. posobie: V 2 ch. 2nd ed., corr. and comp. / Ed. by T. A. Nikonova. Voronezh: Izd-vo VGU, 2016. Ch. 1: Chelovek i khudozhestvennaya real’nost’ v literature 1890–1940-kh godov. 484 p. (

Authors: I. I. Plekhanova

Irkutsk State University, Irkutsk, Russian Federation

In the section Review

Abstract: The analysis evaluates not only the concept of the history of the literature presented in the textbook, with the Silver age and 1920–1930s considered, but also the proposed principles of material selection (directions and authors), correspondence between facts and interpretation of the literary text. The authors of the book proceed from the tradition of examining the literary process in connection with sociocultural and historical events. Special attention is paid to the change of mentality – formation of the non-classical worldview and its influence on the aesthetics, ethics, and the prospects of maintaining national cultural tradition. Half a century of a literary history reveals a search for the new supporting coordinates and transformation of the Russian idealism in its claims for the universal prevalence. The literary process is shown in the light of the aesthetic universals – models of ontological and value-based self-consciousness of a person. These are the universals of culture (second sensegenerating reality), time (driving energy), animated life (all-encompassing process, indisputable force, demanding uninterrupted self-renewal). A historical succession of different eras manifests itself in the maturation of the national philosophy of life – force of nature, waves of history, and persistent epic origin. The delivery of the material combines conceptual chapters reviewing the directions (central cultural tendencies, Russian symbolism, Acmeism, Russian futurism, neorealism, emigration, dynamics of the revolutionary literature in the 1920s and 1930s) and creative portraits of their representatives – poets, writers, and playwrights. The methodology of unravelling the literary process combines humanistic literary studies with aesthetic analysis of artistic systems. It is expressed in the subtitle of the textbook – «A man and the artistic reality». Writer’s plights (I. Bunin, A Kuprin, A. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, M. Sholokhov, A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov) are viewed not from the point of ideology (or conjuncture), but from the point of authors’ ideals, so the literary history is presented as a personified tragedy. A remarkable quality of the textbook is its lively, emotional, scientific, expressive, and contagious mode of thinking-deliberation on literature.

Keywords: literary history, non-classical worldview, universals, traditions, silver age, revolutionary literature, socialist realism

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