The Problem of Fate and Heroism in Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy. Philosophical Analysis

Abstract

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 rejec­tion 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 aes­thetically 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 aristoc­racy outside of history next to the real world of the Pechorins.