God-seeking and Godforsakenness: on some Christian motives in I. S. Shmelev’s prose about the Civil War and the first years of Soviet power (the epic “The Sun of the Dead”, selected stories of the 1920s)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51216/Keywords:
I. S. Shmelev, “The Sun of the Dead” and short stories of the 1920s, Russian revolution and Civil war, the first years of Soviet power, the search for God and God-forsakenness, Christian tradition in Russian literatureAbstract
The article examines the theme of God-seeking and Godforsakenness in I.S. Shmelev’s prose of the 1920s and a complex of Christian motives associated with this theme. The study focuses on the epic “The Sun of the Dead”. Also, to create a more complete picture of the phenomenon, a comparison was made with Shmelev’s short stories and letters, related in theme and time of creation. The study used descriptive, motive and mythological methods. As a result of the study, peculiarities of the artistic implementation of axiological, anthropological and religious categories in I. S. Shmelev’s prose were revealed. According to the author of the article, the theme of God-seeking and Godforsakenness is formed by a certain range of motives in the works under study. The main ones are the motives of madness, sleep, blindness, search, movement, suffering, intellectual impotence, and hope. The image of God in the epic “The Sun of the Dead” is made up of contradictory motives of fate, cruelty, justice, death, resurrection, wisdom, beauty, fertility, mercy, self-sacrifice, and light. Also in Shmelev’s writings, one of the main concepts associated with the theme of communication with God and faith is the immortal soul of man, which corresponds to Christian anthropology. The main conclusion of the work is that in the epic “The Sun of the Dead” the image of God appears in a form somewhat distorted from the Christian point of view. The central object of artistic depiction in the epic can be called the transitional state of a human soul damaged by grief, which has not yet overcome its own despair and lack of faith, but actively thirsts to find support. In this regard, it is noted that the plot of finding faith in God as a result of meeting with human kindness and mercy becomes invariant both in “The Sun of the Dead” and in most of the studied short stories.
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