Бремя модернизации: патриархальные ритуалы, эмансипационная этика и исторические аллюзии в драме А. Ф. Писемского Горькая судьбина

Abstract

The article explores how the social changes of the Russian Great reforms are represented through the love triangle between peasants and nobles in Aleksei Pisemskii’s folk drama Bitter Fate (1859). The adultery of peasant woman Lizaveta falling in love with her landowner becomes a more universal story about the crisis of patriarchal rituals under the onslaught of modernization. The author shows that in Pisemskii’s drama many emancipatory ideas, embodied in the main character Ananii, are closely intertwined with archaic practices and concepts of sin, repentance, and love, which suggests that the modernization project failed. Moreover, the article shows that constant references to tyranny, executions, and tortures in the speech of Lizaveta and Ananii revive the spirit of the bloody Russian history of the eighteenth century, which occupies a large place in the literary and cultural mythology of the Great Reforms era.