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Russian Literature of 1868: In Search of a 'Positively Beautiful Person'

  • Ilya Serman

Abstract:

In response to the stern image of Rachmetov in Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), the interest in which was considerably enhanced by an article coming from the pen of Dmitrii I. Pisarev, three major Russian works of 1868 -- Fedor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the final installments of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (where Platon Karataev appears), and Alexey K. Tolstoy’s play Tsar Fedor Ioannovich -- create their own versions of what Dostoevsky called “a positively beautiful person.” The three works were responses to a profound inner need felt in the contemporary Russian society, and they implicitly pit Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary version of imitatio Christi against their own hagiographical images in which the saintly opposition to mundane or hegemonic values is combined with a restrained comicality that both invites and distances the sympathy of the reader.

 

Born in Vitebsk, Russia, a graduate of Leningrad State University, Professor Serman (1913--2010) of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem served in the Soviet Army during World War II. In 1949 he was arrested on the charge of “anti-Soviet agitation” and spent five years in a labor camp in Kolyma. In 1956--1976 he was a senior research associate in Pushkinskii Dom (The Institute of Literature of the Academy of Science of the USSR) in Leningrad; in 1965--1975 he taught in the philology department of Leningrad University. In 1979 he emigrated to Israel. He is the author of Poeticheskii stil’ Lomonosova [The Style of Lomonosov’s Poetry (1965)], Derzhavin (1967), Russkii klassitsizm [Russian Classicism (1973)]; his books Konstantin Batiushkov (1974) and Mikhail Lomonosov: Life and Poetry (1988) were published in English translation by Twayne Publishers in New York and The Centre of Slavic and Russian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, respectively. 

Updated October 18, 2010

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 3, issue 1 Literature and Ideology Topoi
Last updated on 04/18/2020