Проблема судьбы и героизма у Лермонтова и Льва Толстого. Философский анализ

Вопросы философии. 2022. № 1. С. 122–133.

Kulikov Anton A.

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the problem of fate and heroism

based on the works of Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy. The author examines

this problem against the background of the modern cultural and philosophical

context, bringing the philosophy of literature closer to the philosophy of culture

and philosophical anthropology. The article demonstrates that for Lermontov and

Tolstoy a hero becomes a hero when he meets his fate, opposing his will and

honor to inevitability, strives to become a demigod and to compare to eternity

and multicolored fullness of the nature’s life. The author analyzes the motives

of childishness, merging with nature, meeting with destiny, aristocratic rejec-

tion of modern European rationalism (the philosophy of the bourgeois and

raznochintsy), the rejection of history with its reasonable “sense and purpose”

and the ideas of justice and retribution. All these features of the worldview and

art of Lermontov and Tolstoy are dictated by their heroics. An unreasonable and

unjust world where blind fate reigns is the world depicted in their works and aes-

thetically justified in them. The article also discusses Lermontov and Tolstoy’s

zealous persecution of pseudo-heroism of “our time”: the profanation of fatalism

leads to the degeneration of heroism. Thus, the European world of “knowledge

and doubt”, which has rejected the idea of fate, is contrasted with the world of

heroic play. Both the former and the latter are mythologemes, Lermontov and

Tolstoy strive to build another, mythological world of childishness and aristoc-

racy outside of history next to the real world of the Pechorins.

Keywords: история, history, природа, heroism, героизм, Leo Tolstoy, nature, Mikhail Lermontov, М.Ю. Лермонтов, fate, судьба, детскость, childishness, justice and injustice, justice/injustice, philosophy of aristocrats and philosophy of the bourgeois, Л.Н. Толстой, справедливость/несправедливость, философия аристократов/философия буржуа.