The Russo-Turkish Wars in Russian Literature: Axiological Priorities in Historical Dynamics

Abstract

The paper represents the experience of analytical description of the fictional discourse, which captures the chronicle of the long-lasting military confrontation between the Russian Empire and the Sublime Porta. The author pursues the goal to trace the logic of evaluative dynamic specific to the Russian literary tradition in the perception and reflection of the events of the Russo-Turkish wars. The material of the paper is a sufficiently voluminous corpus of literary and journalistic texts, most fully and clearly representing the wide range and variability of axiological attitudes of participants of the XVI–XIX centuries national literary process who responded to these events. Among them are such iconic names for Russian intellectual and artistic culture as M.V. Lomonosov, G.R. Derzhavin, A.F. Veltman, A.A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, M.P. Pogodin, N.A. Nekrasov, A.N. Pleshcheev, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, V.M. Garshin and many others. As a result, the author concludes that the nearly four-century history of the Russo-Turkish wars provided rich material for creative initiatives of Russian writers and significantly influenced the development of the Russian literary process. Reacting swiftly to the events of numerous military conflicts, fiction produced and clearly demonstrated ideological and axiological priorities of public consciousness from the perspective of their historical dynamics. The general logic of the Russian-Turkish confrontation theme development was directly expressed at the level of poetics in artistic creations. Comparing the early literary experiences of understanding and depicting military conflicts, one can observe a general movement from the general to the particular, from the collective to the individual, from direct evaluation to complex ethical collisions. As artistic consciousness develops, depictions of large-scale battle scenes give way to literary sketches of inner experiences, psychological and existential perspectives replace the external perspective of describing events. The perception of the war is gradually, but more distinctly reveals through the prism of the personal consciousness of an author and his character and is perceived as a personally lived meaningful experience.