A spiritualist perspective on the novel "The Evening Sacrifice" by Pyotr Boborykin

Abstract

The relevance of the work is related to the promising direction of studying the influence of non-classical theologies on the poetics of literary texts of the post-Romantic period. The article examines the spiritual poetics of P.D. Boborykin's novel "The Evening Sacrifice". The cultural-historical method allows us to determine the place of spiritual views and practices in the culture and literature of the 19th century, in the consciousness of society and the authors of literary texts. The article analyses the peculiarities of the representation of members of the spiritualist movement in P.D. Boborykin's novel "The Evening Sacrifice". The comparative method is used to compare the representation of spiritualists in Boborykin’s novel with that of his contemporaries – I.S. Turgenev, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky. If for Turgenev and Tolstoy, the fascination with spiritualism is another sign of the idleness and meaninglessness of the aristocracy's life (and in Tolstoy's case, it is also an occasion to show the superiority of peasants over it), then for Dostoevsky, spiritualism reveals the peculiarities of the relationship between faith and fact for a person, which allowed him to deduce the concept of "true realist" Alyosha in “The Brothers Karamazov”, and for Boborykin it is an alternative value system that allows one to reconsider their moral and intellectual views by comparing them with it. The revealed differences allow us to establish the individual characteristics of the views of each of the selected authors. The semiotic method allows us to trace the features of the construction of the poetics of literary texts and the role that spiritualism plays in it. Allan Kardec's religious and philosophical views, which include faith in the evolution of the soul through a series of reincarnations, which can be achieved under the guidance of helping souls of a higher level of development, turn out to be a way of organising the structure of P.D. Boborykin's novel "The Evening Sacrifice", the basis for the dynamics of its plot and the connection of characters. Spiritualism also plays a role in the specifics of the novel's gender issues, which is confirmed by the author's out-of-text testimonies. The results of the research can be applied in the study of the history of Russian literature and the sociology of religion.