Hea ilus valu: Baturini tegelaste estetiseeritud kannatused
Good and Beautiful Pain: the Aesthetisized Sufferings of the Characters in Nikolai Baturin's Novels

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the relationship between beauty, morality, truth and pain in Nikolai Baturin's prose fiction. Since the Enlightenment, it has been a critical commonplace to consider beauty, morality and truth as distinct spheres. Nikolai Baturin, however, uses pain as a means to connect the three spheres within the unity of an image. Baturin has idealized suffering and disdained happiness thoughout his career as a prose writer. Suffering is purifying, as we see in Baturin's texts: it brings forth the inner truth of human existence. As such, it also presents an ethical choice for that person. Somewhat surprisingly, Baturin also connects suffering with beauty. The article seeks to understand this connection between beauty and the sublime by drawing upon Aristotle's notion of catharsis and Kant's understanding of the sublime. In particular, it puzzles over the fact that, in Baturin's works, catharsis itself emerges as sublime – and the sublime, for its part, involves a degree of catharsis. Correspondingly, death, for Baturin's key characters, is the poetic highlight of their lives, the culmination of the beautiful, which turns suffering into the revelation of an inner truth.

• Details
• Contents