Reflection of the Ideolo­gical Diversity of I.S. Lukash’s Works in his Di­logy “The House of the Dead” and “The Devil”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the works of I.S. Lukash, a significant writer of the first wave of emigration, that were published abroad in Russian. Previous literary criticism comprehended I.S. Lukash’s works fragmentary, sometimes one-sided, sometimes biased. The aim of the article is to complete two tasks: to trace the creative evolution of I.S. Lukash; to formulate and substantiate the hypothesis of appropriateness to unite in a dilogy his mystery “The Devil” and his poem “The House of the Dead”, never considered separately before. These tasks caused the structuring of the article into sections, of which the first is devoted to the ideological and thematic evolution of I.S. Lukash as a writer, the second — to the hypothetical unity of the mystery “Devil” and the poem “The House of the Dead”. With the help of catalogs and collections of the largest libraries in Russia and abroad, the article identifies and engages foreign publications of I.S. Lukash’s work in Russian. On the basis of this material, there is performed an analysis of the ideological diversity of I.S. Lukash’s works. The article reveals the main range of narrative themes, the genre diversity, the author’s individuality, the uniqueness of philosophical vision. There is traced the evolution of I.S. Lukash’s works, in which three main chronological stages are distinguished: ego-futuristic, military-patriotic, “St. Petersburg”.From I.S. Lukash’s creative heritage, the article, for the first time, pays special attention to the mystery “The Devil” and the poem “The House of the Dead”, and emphasizes the genre originality of both the works. In the context of the identified ideological evolution of I.S. Lukash’s works at various levels — chronological, genre, textual, narrative, philosophical — there is examined the hypothesis of appropriateness to unite the two works into a conventional dilogy. The conclusion notes the up-to-date relevance of both the works by I.S. Lukash.