Information about the author:
Elena Yu. Knorre
Elena Yu. Knorre — PhD in Philology, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Orthodox St. Tikhon University for the Humanities, Likhov lane, 6, p. 1, 127051 Moscow, Russia.
E-mail:
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3272-8659
Abstract:
The article reconstructs, for the first time, the motif of spiritual victory, which unites M.M. Prishvin’s diaries of the First World War, the Civil War and the Second World War. Prishvin perceives the Great Patriotic War through the experience of the two previous wars that the writer lived through. Against the background of real events in the rear, reports of military operations in the diaries of 1941–1945, an eschatological reading of the war as the path of humanity through the fall, the atonement of sin to the resurrection from the dead is revealed. Victory in Prishvin’s diaries is the overcoming of enmity and discord in the human soul, the source of which Prishvin sees in theoretical thinking that ignores a living personality. Hitler’s cold calculation, his self-confident order, placing an abstract idea above the personal law of life, is defeated by the “joy of closed breaths”, the internal organization of the people manifesting the “free order” of God’s creativity, which, according to Prishvin, united both soldiers at the front, workers at the factories and on collective farms. The motif of the “resurrection from numbers”, the revelation of the “invisible church” (1918), the “great Council of the living” (1941), the “joy of closed breaths” (church service on May 6, 1945) constitute a single plot of the “creation of the world”, uniting Prishvin with the literary and philosophical tradition of the 19th century (N.F. Fedorov, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky) and the 20th century (A.K. Gorsky, S.N. Bulgakov).
Keywords: M.M. Prishvin, diary, philosophy of war, eschatology, N.F. Fedorov, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, S.N. Bulgakov, Holy Week, “mechanization of the world”, resurrection of the dead.
