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Abstract: The article deals with the issue of the spiritual-aesthetic genesis of L. M. Leonov (1899–1994) in connection with the 125th anniversary of the writer’s birth. Leonov’s creative strategy was formed under the influence of the comprehension of being as a metaphysical reality, reflecting the contradictions of Russian civilization and Russian character. Leonov belongs to artists with an openly manifested national type of creative activity. The place and the role of the national idea in the heritage of the classic of the Russian literature of the 20th century are generally described by modern literary criticism and pochvennik writers (soil writers) (V. Rasputin, V. Shukshin, etc.). At the same time, the spiritual context of Leonov’s works, his language, style and poetics have not been sufficiently studied from the point of view of the “inner word”, the ability to creatively embody the main ideas, the originality of the image of the world, and the specificity of the national consciousness. Leonov studies often employ a simplified mythocentric approach, which ignores the spiritual-symbolic nature of the writer’s thinking. The aim of this final stage of the research is to iden-tify the specificity of the author’s thinking and to present the primary basis of the writer’s literary-aesthetic intuition. The article summarizes Leonov studies of the 1960s – early 2000s (V. A. Kovalev, N. A. Groznova, V. I. Khrulev, T. M. Vakhitova, A. G. Lysov, etc.) and presents the intermediate results of the author’s own observations on the trend of spiritual search of Leonov. The authorial concept of the symbol as a universal tool for cognition of the cultural code of Russian historical life prevails in Leonov's artistic prac-tice. The introductory part of the article contains theses outlining the transition to the main part. In this part, the innovative nature of the writer’s thoughts and words correlates with the specificity of his symbolic-realistic method. The methodology of the article is determined by the philosophical, ethnopoetic, and spiritual-cultural originality of the texts under study. L. M. Leonov; national identity; symbolic-realistic method; metaphysics; metaphorical thinking

About the author(s) :

Alexander A. Dyrdin
Ulyanovsk State Technical University (Ulyanovsk, Russia)
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2920-3752

Acknowledgments: The study is accomplished with financial support of the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 23-28-00905 “Aesthetic Meanings and Fractal Poetics of the Latest Russian Prose: A. P. Platonov, L. M. Leonov, A. V. Ivanov”).

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 18.07.2024; date of publication: 30.10.2024

References:

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