Papashino's Prophecy: why Russian literature is full of robbers and murderers
A new book by literature teacher Gayane Stepanyan not only tells about several high-profile criminal cases and famous frauds from classic Russian literature of the 19th century, but also allows you to create a fairly complete picture of the popular book in psychological circles by the Italian Luigi Zoya "Father. Historical, Psychological and Cultural Analysis", published in 2000. It is this bestseller by an authoritative Jungian analyst that Stepanyan chooses as the main methodological tool in his study of the motives that push literary heroes on a criminal path. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.
Gayane Stepanyan
"You killed, sir... : The philosophy of the criminal plot in Russian Classical Literature"
Moscow: Boslen, 2026. 160 p.
At first, it may seem a little unexpected when, in the introduction, Stepanyan suddenly moves from discussions about the relationship between individual and social guilt in criminal literary plots to the biblical concept of the father and his cultural significance: "European (and Russian) culture largely originates from the biblical text, one of the interpretations of the plot of which is: "In fact, both the Old and New Testaments are an endless search for the Father, who finds himself over and over again, only to be lost again."
This is the first quote from Zoya's book, which is full of Stepanyan's book, which examines Russian criminal plots through the prism of the archetype of the father proposed by the Italian Jungian. But if Zoya, saddened by the gradual destruction of the patriarchy (in the good sense of the last word) and the modern crisis of fatherhood, studies the paternal archetype in ancient myths — the Iliad and the Odyssey - then Stepanyan's goal is to follow the material of Pushkin, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Leskov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. image and authority make it possible for literary heroes to commit an offense, frees their hands: "... the motive for every crime, from a philosophical point of view, is the absence — or loss — of a Father, that is, the will that binds the hero of the work with the innermost and deepest meanings of those insights that are passed down from generation to generation as a legacy as the moral law."
At the same time, Stepanyan does not forget the legal law either, starting each chapter with the relationship of a particular writer with the law, which inevitably affects the sideways way in which a particular writer turns criminal plots in his writings. The most difficult relationship with jurisprudence was formed by Leo Tolstoy, who managed to study at the Faculty of Law only in order to instinctively feel the deep wrongness and depravity of the human theory of law, from which the existing laws follow. Tolstoy later dedicated "Resurrection" to this, which he considered his most successful creation (although both ordinary readers and literary critics would have hotly argued here). In addition, the legal nihilism that developed in the writer's soul and the denial of human laws as a form of violence turned Tolstoy into the first Russian human rights defender who worked hard on cases of innocent convicts or victims of circumstances.
The first hero of Stepanyan's book, A.S. Pushkin (from whose legacy "Little Tragedies", "Dubrovsky" and "The Queen of Spades" were used), had, as Stepanyan writes, quite professional ideas about the legal system, having received legal training at the Lyceum, where one of his favorite teachers was the prominent lawyer A.P. Kunitsyn. In addition, among Pushkin's acquaintances there were many figures from the legal field, for example, M.M. Speransky. Pushkin was the first Russian writer to come up with the idea of inserting an authentic court extract into an artistic text ("Dubrovsky") for greater clarity: "Everyone will be pleased to see one of the ways in which we can lose our estate in Russia, to which we have an indisputable right." Again calling on the help of the faithful Zoya, Stepanyan draws a rather original parallel between the noble robber Vladimir Dubrovsky and Achilles in the Iliad — both of them are deprived of the correct image of their father, are "in a fatherless or pre-fatherly state," driven not by civic duty, but by anger, their courage is "devoid of responsibility, blind and self-destructive," and moral authority is replaced by the authority of force.
If in "Dubrovsky" the theme of fatherhood, one might say, catches the eye and is conveniently illustrated by two whole related pairs — the Dubrovskys and the Troekurovs — then when analyzing some other works, one has to try a little more to decipher the paternal connotations and bring them to the surface. But Stepanyan does not deny that many of the authors of the works she used themselves, most likely, did not at all "connect the issues of trouble and guilt with the theme of the father — at least consciously." But if not a literal, biological father, then at least a figurative, spiritual, symbolic one can always be found in any decent literary work, even between the lines.
In the same Tolstoy, the theme of the reunion of lost heroes with the Heavenly Father as the bearer of the only true moral law is in all its biblical edification, and, according to Stepanyan, Raskolnikov overcomes the same spiritual path in Crime and Punishment, the phrase from which "You killed ..." is included in the title of her book. The researcher also writes down investigator Porfiry Petrovich, who utters this remark, as "fatherly figures" in the social and religious sense, giving irrefutable arguments: "As an investigator, he is literally called upon to restore the law and protect it. The investigator's name is symbolic: Porphyry (from the Greek "porphyry" — royal mantle) refers to the idea of royal power. Patronymic Petrovich is also significant.: it refers to the Apostle Peter, emphasizing the Christian aspect of fatherhood." Moreover, Marmeladov becomes a kind of fatherly figure for Raskolnikov, who is in spiritual search of his father, and at some point the hero takes care of and worries about him as if he were his own father.
Stepanyan got the idea of Marmeladov as a paternal substitute for Raskolnikov from Sergei Nosov's recent phantasmagorical novel "Dostoevsky's Bells", but the parallels between Raskolnikov and Macbeth were found at the end of the penultimate century by the French literary critic Eugene Melchior de Vogue. As Stepanyan notes, Raskolnikov has an obsession with power in common with Macbeth, and besides, Dostoevsky's novel, like Shakespeare's tragedy, describes not only the crime itself, but also its psychological consequences for the criminal.
Quotations from Shakespeare's most formidable tragedies — not only Macbeth, but also The Tempest, Hamlet, King Lear, and Richard III—serve as epigraphs for each chapter in Stepanyan's book. However, the most direct Shakespearean analogy can be traced, of course, in the analysis of the work, where it is put into the title by the author himself — Leskov's story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district", the chapter about which Stepanyan called "The First Russian anti-tale". The antiheroes of this anti-tale are "dead from the very beginning," according to the literary critic, and have no chance of moral revival: "In Leskov's story, evil literally reigns supreme, filling an empty paternal place, because the image of the Father is lost both by the heroine herself and by the society surrounding her."
Together with Ostrovsky's "The Thunderstorm" (which became one of Leskov's sources of inspiration), "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" forms the darkest and most hopeless part of the book, which contains enough examples of successful, albeit painful, searches for a Father and the moral transformation of the stumbled heroes. However, the tragic examples of the two deceased Katerinas, Izmailova and Kabanova, should by no means stop the reader on his personal path of "father—seeking", rather the opposite. Gayane Stepanyan speaks about this in the finale, sending farewell greetings to his Jungian spiritual "parent" Luigi Zoya with his concept of the father as a symbol of memory, continuity and responsibility for the future.: "No matter how mundane the personal experience of everyone has been, we can and should all try to get to know the father within ourselves."
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