Поиски «национального характера» в контексте социокультурной реальности России рубежа XIX—XX вв. (На примере образа Сергия Радонежского)
The search for «national character» in the context of socio-cultural reality of Russia at the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries (On the figure of St. Sergius Radonezhski’s example)

Summary/Abstract: The authors of the article set a goal of presenting the main directions of the quest for a «national character» in the context of the socio-cultural reality of Russia at the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries. This theme is relevant for several reasons. First, the solution of questions about the formative principles of the Russian cultural-historical type brought together representatives of the intelligentsia of the beginning of the 20th century to a correlating understanding of the real — inward — nature of the Russian people, and, accordingly, the cultural phenomena created by this consciousness. This led, among other things, to a peculiar dialogue of cultures — the culture of Ancient Russia and the culture of the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries, reflected in various forms of art: literature, painting, music. Secondly, the apocalyptic sentiments that prevailed at the end of the 19th century in Russia demanded the revival of such values, images and signs that they were able to rediscover the acquired the God’s grace on the Russian land. There is a real discovery by the intellectual elite of the world of the Russian holiness: thinkers of the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries actively convey their subjective perception of the orthodox experience. Something similar is happening in modern Russia — hence the keen interest in the «frontier stages» of cultural development, in the diversity of trends and the meaningful semantic searches of a century ago. According to the authors of the article, a number of metaphysical, spiritual and religious foundations of Russian culture are historically personified in the image of Sergius Radonezhsky. In the conditions of intense spiritual searches for thinkers of the turn of the century, it was important to know not a private fragment of conditional life, but a real, overgrown struggle to restore the integrity and fullness of a human being. In this sense, the history of Sergius Radonezhsky, as the history transformed by the feat and grace of the Holy Spirit of the human person, becomes both the embodiment of the ideological complex of Orthodoxy, and the realization of the ideological and aesthetic concept of deification as a movement to the highest point of spiritual development.

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