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THE PHENOMENON OF DOUBLENESS IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE

A. Stankevica, E. Vasiljeva, E. Isajeva, J. Semeneca

Abstract

Doubleness is one of the most spread artistic methods of constructing a personality in European culture, which has a rich tradition. It received a special universal status in the era of Late Romanticism. In Romanticism, doubleness is an embodiment of a tragically incomplete breakthrough of a man to the eternally beautiful and perfect in those times, when the world started to be perceived as terrible and hopeless. Modernity presented a specific variation of Romantic doubleness; a double of the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries is a result of a multifaceted analysis of the phenomenon of torn consciousness of a personality at the turn of the centuries. The article analyzes the semantics of the method of doubleness in the creative works written by the writers of the past decades, such as V. Makanin, M. Shishkin, E. Vodolazkin. The research methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach that combines elements of cultural anthropology, comparative studies and cultural-historical, philological, component and contextual analysis. In the prose written by different writers, the systems of characters-doubles are typologically close, but they can differ in the degree of complexity and sophistication. In connection with the principles of character system construction under analysis, such details as mirror, letter, portrait, etc. acquire special significance. In the universal artistic world, doubleness is often extrapolated to the nature that is close to man. The concept of personality, which is most often represented in contemporary Russian literature, is an embodiment of the absolute tragedy of human existence. A man is doomed to follow someone else’s path and a given matrix, being devoid of wholeness and uniqueness. The overcoming of these processes is possible only at the cost of selfless devotion.

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