Журнал «Филоlogos»

THE PROBLEM OF THE REPRESENTATIVE PERSONality in the novel by Mikhail Prishvin "Tsar's Road" (to the image of the All-man)

Author: Shubin R.V.

The article is devoted to hermeneutic interpretation of the novel by Mikhail Prishvin "Tsar's Road" ("Osudareva doroga"). The writer's attempt to justify the coercion of socialism, to investigate the need for violence to preserve the "unity of the soul" forms an acute historical and ethical conflict in the novel. The conflict depicted in the novel is considered in the mainstream of Russian hermeneutics. Russian hermeneutics adapts the interpretative practices associated with the dialectic of unity and the concept of a representative (collective) personality. An important element of the representative personality is the Anotherness (Ukhtomsky, Bakhtin, Hayrapetyan), transformed into the impersonal personality of the All-man (Hayrapetyan) and the Total-man, the One-man (Prishvin). These concepts unite the unified principle of formation: "all as one person". The article presents a brief genesis of the image of a One-man in Prishvin: the image of the All-man goes back to the first voyage to Vyguretsia, described in the book "In the Edge of the Non-scared Birds" ("V kraju nepuganych ptic") and is associated with the Khlyst eschatology. At the same time, differences in the concepts of the representative personality were noted. The difference between the triadic concept of a representative personality (the only god - the united All-man - a single layman) is distinguished from a binary one (a single person - a united Total-man) used by Prishvin. It is assumed that the absence of the third element (god) in Prishvin correlates with excessive attention to the self, the special role of individual representation, realized in the creative personality. The characteristic moment of creative individuation in Prishvin's novel is "the Russian craving for another". Particularly, two motives are considered, connected with the building up of collective and individual meanings in the image of the Total man. The specificity of the collective Total man works to justify the regime, and personal individuation (the self) is aimed at the child's entry into the adult world and the entry of the world (All-man man) into a person. Thus, the duality of the author's approach to the problem of the construction of the White Sea-Baltic canal is revealed. By imposing the idea of collective sacrifice and collective salvation, the writer nevertheless stands on the side of individual rebirth and the formation of personality, achieved far from people. This problematizes an unambiguous interpretation of the novel as an apologetic one.