Люди сороковых годов в поисках полноты жизни: Опыт описания понятийных конструкций

Abstract

The topic of this article is the pair of concepts “enjoyment-suffering”, which, as linguistic intuition shows, correlates with a large quantity of lexemes: enjoyment is synonymous with pleasure, bliss; while suffering is synonymous with pain, torment, passion. Enjoyment-suffering is at times antithetical, and at other times mutually complementary, creating unexpected combinations. The fundamental hypothesis of this article is that in the first third of the nineteenth century the enjoyment-suffering pair ceases to be viewed as an antithesis, and forms a synthesis, one that is expressed in the phrase “a full life”. Russian intellectuals’ reading of German authors in the 1820s–30s – which signalled a break both from French rationalist philosophy and from empiricism in its various forms – opened up new possibilities for appropriating the world. The exploring heroes (Belinskii, Bakunin, Ogarev, Gertsen) were supposed to find themselves among the new conceptualisations of human existence, to interpret and re-interpret their own past and present, so as to ultimately develop a new language for describing their own “I”. Henceforth, the major role would be played not by self-restraint and stoic repression of passion, but by maximal expansion, where enjoyment and suffering, together with other concepts, become constitutive features of a subject, overturning commonplace ideas about life.