Ivan Il Research Articles

Inner freedom in Russian philosophy

ABSTRACT This article examines the Russian concept of inner freedom by means of a study of the work of various pre-revolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet thinkers, namely Ignatii Brianchaninov, Konstantin Aksakov, Boris Chicherin, Vladimir Solov’ev, Nikolai Berdiaev, Ivan Il′in, Andrei Amal′rik, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Igor′ Evlampiev, and Ol′ga Sedakova. These thinkers have defined inner freedom as obedience to moral imperatives, but an obedience freely chosen, dependent on the elimination of internal and external obstacles that prevent individuals from choosing between right and wrong and acting in accordance with their consciences. The article outlines a conservative liberal tradition within Russian philosophy that has often shown a strong preference for inner freedom over outer freedom. This preference has led some of those within this tradition to be tolerant of authoritarian forms of government, but at the same time to resist totalitarianism on the grounds that the latter intrudes on inner freedom. The result is a political philosophy that to many observers may seem paradoxical, being both liberal and illiberal at the same time.

Rylkova , Galina Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 744 Rylkova, Galina. Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2020. xviii + 185 pp. Illustrations. Table. Notes. Index. $29.95; £24.95 (paperback). Galina Rylkova’s Breaking Free from Death explores how Russian writers deal with the psychological burden of authorship. By attending closely to the writers’ daily routine, familial relations and correspondence with friends, it seeks to demonstrate that the source of authorial anxiety, especially in the face of mortality, was not caused by abstract philosophizing but stemmed from the complex psychological dynamics of mundane interactions with friends and relatives. The first part of the book focuses on the theme of death in Tolstoi and Chekhov. The argument here is that as both authors were nearing their deaths, they were trying to make the thought of mortality both psychologically more manageable and artistically more productive. On Rylkova’s reading, Tolstoi’s intense interest in death was due to his formidable hypochondria which he concealed and nursed behind the façade of his literary masterpieces (p. 16). For example, Levin’s search for meaning in Anna Karenina is also Tolstoi’s own search for a distraction from his depression and continuous self-deprecation. By turning hypochondria into fuel for his writing Tolstoi not only solved his own psychological problems but also wrote himself out of an artistic crisis. The Death of Ivan Il´ich for Rylkova serves as the most vivid example of Tolstoi using literature to draw himself away from a spiritual and creative precipice. A psychoanalytical study of The Death of Ivan Il´ich serves as an effective bridge for an exploration of Tolstoi’s biography. In chapter two Rylkova makes a compelling argument for why the late Tolstoi’s relationship with his disciple and editor Vladimir Chertkov, which lasted for a quarter century, should be seen not as Chertkov’s selfish manipulation of a senile writer, but as a collaboration created by Tolstoi himself to remain creative up through his final years. Like Dante’s Virgil, by means of ‘epistolary psychotherapy’ Chertkov gently guided Tolstoi through the writer’s vulnerable descent to mortality (p. 42). The chapters on Chekhov open with an original reading of Uncle Vania. Rylkova sees Voinitskii’s revolt against Professor Serebriakov not as Uncle Vania’s late spiritual awakening but rather as a tragic misunderstanding of his existential dependence on Serebriakov’s literary career. On Rylkova’s reading the world of the play emerges as an unrecognized psychological ‘ecosystem’ wherein the co-dependencies of the writer and his immediate circle make everyone’s life possible. Through the tragic lens of the play Rylkova examines Chekhov’s own life. The focus is Chekhov’s two journeys to Sakhalin Island and through the southern provinces of the Russian Empire, which Rylkova sees REVIEWS 745 as his efforts to get away from his family and thus escape the ecosystem that sustained his authorial existence. Both trips exposed Chekhov’s psychological and artistic limits, revealing to him his creative and existential dependency on others, which, as Rylkova argues, he then explored in ‘Sakhalin Island’ (1893–95) and ‘The Steppe’ (1888). In ‘The Steppe’ Rylkova finds a synthesis of the apprehensions Chekhov had to live through on the steppe and his authorial anxiety at being alone in the boundless terrain of his first novel (p. 88). The form of the novel moved Chekhov to think intensely about the meaning of life and death. In the second part of the book Rylkova explores the effect of Tolstoi’s and Chekhov’s texts on other others’ exploration of mortality. For Meierkhol´d the staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895), where Meierkhol´d both identified with, and strove to overcome, the tragic fate of Konstantin Treplev, offered an opportunity to overcome his own artistic stagnation and develop his innovative stylized theatre. In a chapter on Ivan Bunin Rylkova explores Bunin’s attempts at writing biographies of Tolstoi and Chekhov as a means of living his own life through an intense identification with these two literary giants. The final two chapters offer Rylkova’s reading of Chekhov’s last play The Cherry Orchard (1904) in connection...

DeBlasio, Alyssa The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century (review)

REVIEWS 745 lifetime. Hopp presents an overview of the translated material together with a detailed review of Mulatságos napok, as Mme de Gomez is titled in Hungarian. The final two essays look at the Hungarian literary scene after Mikes’s death. The manuscript of the Letters was found among his effects and in 1789 came into the hands of István Kulcsár of Szombathely. The criminality (in Habsburg eyes) of its author, its association with Ferenc Rákóczi and the kuruc tone of numerous passages might have prevented publication in the Habsburg Empire, but in the reign of the enlightened Joseph II (1765–90) censorship eased. Kulcsár, in association with Sándor Kisfaludy and others, took advantage of this, and the Letters received the imprimatur in July 1792, early in the reign of Franz II and I (Hopp deals with the complexities of all this in some detail, but in one point is in slight error: there was no interregnum between Joseph and Franz, but the brief reign of Leopold II from December 1790 until March 1792). Had Kulcsár not been fortunate in this respect the Letters would, at best, not have been published for a long time, as repression was resumed under Franz. (The Letters were first published in 1794 and the manuscript itself is now in the library of the Esterházy Károly Főiskola in Eger.) Lastly, there comes a short piece on the concept of the ‘Early Enlightenment’. It is generally agreed that in Hungary the Enlightenment came into effect in the second half of the eighteenth century, rather later than in the West, and some scholars have used the term Frühaufklärung to denote a quasi-preliminary period preceding this. Hopp rejects this imprecise usage, but finds in Mikes’s ‘Letter 51’ of 1723 a foreshadowing of the thinking of the Enlightenment, halfway between past and future, but promising a social philosophy. This small anthology is, therefore, a vastly informative and thoroughly scholarly addition to the study of both the period as a whole and the work of Kelemen Mikes in particular. Hopp spoke French but did not publish in that language, so much credit is due to his anonymous translators and to the editors for establishing an eminently readable text. The editors should, however, have seen that footnote 14 on p. 174 might be more helpfully worded. Zánka Bernard Adams DeBlasio, Alyssa. The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2014. xi + 216 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. In 1922, Lenin expelled about sixty-nine presumed anti-Soviet intellectuals and their families from Russia. The intellectuals were placed on two steamships, the first of which left on 28 September, the second on 16 November, that is, a few weeks before the official creation of the Soviet Union in late SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 746 December. Although there were in fact two steamers, and even though not all of the intellectuals on board were philosophers, the whole thing is conjointly remembered as ‘the Philosophy Steamer’. The two ships carried away, amongst others, the philosophers Iulii Aikhenval´d (translator of Schopenhauer), Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Ivan Il´in, Lev Karsavin, Ivan Lapshin, Nikolai Losskii and Boris Vysheslavtsev. This event, which has been compared to the medieval inquisition, marked the end of an era for Russian philosophy — the end of what is sometimes called ‘prerevolutionary Russian Philosophy’, ‘Russian religious philosophy’, or ‘Russian idealism’. Prerevolutionary Russian Philosophy is a tradition that more or less began with the philosophy of Vladimir Solov´ev — who is often regarded as the first great Russian philosopher — and that was developed further by his followers, such as the brothers Trubetskoi, Ernest Radlov, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Nikolai Losskii and others. This tradition is characterized as a Christian NeoPlatonism and is said to reach back to Plato and Plotinus through the Byzantium Eastern Fathers (Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor). The religiosity, mysticism, idealism (i.e., Platonism), bourgeois preoccupation with speculative metaphysical issues and sentimentalism of this tradition was perceived as reactionary to the anti...

Review: Trans. Alessandro de Magistris and Gianluigi Giacone by Alessandro de Magistris, Irina Korob'ina, editors

Alessandro de Magistris and Irina Korob'ina , editors, Ivan Leonidov, 1902–1959 . Trans. Alessandro de Magistris and Gianluigi Giacone , Milan: Electa/architettura, 2009, 324 pp., 207 color and 130 b/w illus. €110, ISBN 978883705761 In 1978 the Architectural League of New York opened a small exhibition about a then-obscure Soviet architect, Ivan Il’ic Leonidov. Two decades later, in 2002, Rem Koolhaas declared in Moscow, at the celebration of Leonidov's 100th anniversary, “If the entire twentieth-century architecture of the world was destroyed, it could be brought back to life through the genetic code of Leonidov's architecture” (117). Koolhaas also suggested that Leonidov's three idiosyncratic ceramic, glass, and steel towers for the 1934 NARKOMTJAŽPROM competition be raised at New York's Ground Zero. What is certain is that his discovery of Leonidov's architecture in 1971 at the exhibition Art and Revolution , organized by Oleg Svidkovskij at the Hayward Gallery in London, was the catalyst that propelled the Dutch architect to abandon his career as a filmmaker in order to become one of the most important architects of our day. Kenneth Frampton was no less emphatic when he wrote in 1981, in the preface to the American translation of the first monograph the Soviets dedicated to Leonidov (published in Russian in 1971), “There is probably no figure of the modern movement who haunts the stage of the twentieth century with such persistence as Ivan Leonidov.”1 Indeed, both the Parc de la Villette in Paris and analogous cultural and recreational facilities in Japan are avowed progeny of Leonidov's radical concept of a Palace of Culture (Dvorec Kultury) designed for a Moscow competition in 1929. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid for the Louvre—a Palace of Culture par excellence—echoes Leonidov's Palace of Culture glass pyramid, with a dirigible hovering above. Leonidov, a passionate adept of aircraft, was playing off the image published in the Soviet press in the 1920s featuring a dirigible cruising above the pyramids of Luxor. It is no less true, even if unacknowledged, that Le Corbusier's …

The Crisis of National Identity and ‘Sovereign-Democracy’ in Russia

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the most serious problems for today's Russia is how to establish stability and identity as a nation.There are two reasons this problem is especially serious in Russia. First, because of historical, social psychological and other reasons, Russian society has trouble creating autonomous public order. The present writer calls this aspect of Russian society a ‘sand-society’, which means a society where stable order and a market economy are difficult to establish without some measure of authoritarianism. The high rate of support for President Putin reflects, not stability, but a public fear of instability. Second, Russia, in spite of the social characteristics mentioned above, is trying to keep up the appearance of an advanced G8 nation with a civil society based on the rule of law and democratic values. It was in order to cope with this dilemma and to justify his government that Vladislav Surkov set forth his ‘Sovereign-Democracy’ theory of Neo-Slavophilism.There is a strong distrust towards the Western world behind this theory, which insists on Russian individuality and is inimical to interventions or ‘exportation of democracy’ by the West, as in the cases of the collapse of governments in Georgia and Ukraine. This theory above all justifies the great power of the Russian State, emphasizes Russian individuality or peculiarity and affirms people's demands for order, stability, and especially a strong leader.This theory is based on the ideas of Ivan Il'in, who was a Russianist religious thinker condemned for being a reactionary and deported from Soviet Union in 1922. Il'in describes Russian culture as synthetic, intuitive, and organic, while characterizing Western culture as analytic, materialistic, and logical. Surkov's theory retains the basic tenets of Slavophilism, which set Plato above Aristotle and was closely related to German Romanticism and mysticism, while making no deeper interpretation of its roots.Surkov points out three features of Russian political culture—‘centralization’, ‘idealization’, and‘personification’.‘Centralization’ means that strong centralized power guarantees stability.‘Idealization’ means that the Russians feel uncomfortable without an ideal or a mission such as ‘the Third Rome’ or ‘the Third International’. ‘Personification’ means that, in Russia, a person (leader) is considered more important than institutions.The problem of establishing identity in Russia is the problem of stabilizing a ‘sand-society’. Considering these three features in relation to this problem, there are two requirements for stabilizing the ‘sand-society’. One is a ‘mold’ or a ‘framework’ to give sand a form, and the other is ‘cement’ to fix it. Of the three features in Surkov's ‘sovereign-democracy’ theory, ‘centralization’, and ‘personification’ are the ‘mold’ or ‘framework’, while ‘idealization’, and ‘personification’ make up the ‘cement’. Against this Neo-Slavophilism or ‘sovereign-democracy’, so-called modern, Westernizers, democrats, reformists and social democrats-are criticizing Surkov. Curiously, therefore, the controversy between Slavophiles and Westernizers that occurred 150 years ago is now repeating itself. One Russian political scientist describes this phenomenon as a deja vu and says it means that the problems dating back to the middle of the 19th century have not yet been solved.

A Cognitive Approach to Metaphor in Prose: Truth and Falsehood in Leo Tolstoy's “The Death of Ivan Il'ich”

Russian has two words corresponding to English truth and four words corresponding to English lie. While studies have detailed the semantic and pragmatic differences between these two terms, how these domains are metaphorized in everyday language—and exploited in literature—has yet to be examined. In the first half of the article, I present an analysis of everyday metaphorical expressions for Truth and Falsehood in contemporary Russian. Linguistic evidence suggests that these domains are understood via a small set of interrelated conceptual structures. Metaphorical expressions in Russian cluster around one basic metaphor (KNOWING IS SEEING) and three image-schematic structures (STRAIGHT, PATH, and CONTAINER). This network of everyday metaphors serves as a point of reference for an examination of Tolstoy's aesthetic representations of the same domains. In the second part, I examine Tolstoy's extensions and elaborations of metaphors for Truth and Falsehood in his postconversion works, and I argue that they comprise a central metaphorical motif, the full complexity of which has yet to be appreciated, in his novella “The Death of Ivan Il'ich.”

On Resistance to Evil by Force: Ivan Il'in and the Necessity of War

In 1925, Russian philosopher Ivan Il'in published a book entitled On Resistance to Evil by Force . The book generated a bitter polemic among @migré Russian thinkers, which constitutes probably the most thorough debate on the justification of the use of force ever conducted among Russian scholars. This paper analyses Il'in's work and places it into the context of Russian history and philosophy. Il'in argued that war was sometimes necessary, but never 'just'. On occasions, the only way of fulfilling one's obligation to resist evil is to fight. At such times one must do so. But one must understand that what one is doing, though necessary, is unjust, because one is always at least partially responsible for the situation which made violence necessary. While not shirking one's responsibilities, it is only by facing up to the guilt of one's deeds that one can prevent war from undermining one's moral equilibrium. This paper shows that most of those who took part in the debate provoked by Il'in's book agreed with the fundamentals of his argument. This fact illustrates that there is a distinctive Russian philosophy regarding the use of force which in important aspects differs from Western just war theory.

Rapprochement or Rivalry?: Russia-China Relations in a Changing Asia by Sherman W. s> Garnett (review)

REVIEWS 17I different, is a warning against too easy categorizations of thinkers. It is important to know not only what a person thought, but the lifestyle and practicesthat accompanied the thought. One of the difficultiesin discussing Russian messianism is thus that it is hardto knowexactlywhat certainpeople reallybelieved.AsDuncan implicitly observes,itisaproblemhighlightedby the characterof Shatovin Dostoevskii's TheDevils:Shatov believed in Russia'scallingto be a God-bearingpeople, yet was not sureof his own personalbelief in God (p. 36). ForShatov and this surely represents an important problem for the scholar of Russian messianism - ideological conviction and personalbelief did not fullycoincide. It is for this reason that I would like to have seen some reflection on the roots of messianism at a personal and experiential level. Amongst messianic and nationalistthinkers,it is not alwaysclear what kind of belief one is really dealing with. Duncan observes that there existed some kind of alliance between communism and Russian Orthodox messianism at the end of the Soviet era (p. I29). Beneath allegiances to Party or church, there were doubtless structuresof thought and habits of mind with much in common. Yet, what kind of experiences gave rise to the beliefs we are dealing with?To what extent did these ideasreflectgenuine personalbelief? One possible reason why communism and certain kinds of Orthodox messianismwere sometimes compatible is that they were abstractsystemsof thought;theycould thusbe espousedwithout anypersonalcostto thebeliever. At the beginning of his book Duncan cites the Russian philosopher P. Ia. Chaadaev's view that Russia was destined to teach the world a lesson, and suggests that, indeed, Russia does 'warn the rest of the world against states pursuingideas at the expense of people' (p. i). How truethat is. One area which is not discussed is the twentieth-centuryRussian emigration . Duncan drawsconsiderablyfrom Berdiaev's TheRussian Idea(I947), and indeed states that his own book is the first text on Russian messianism to appearin Englishsince the publicationof Berdiaev'stext (p. 4). Perhapsthere could have been more material on Berdiaev as a thinker. Similarly,Russian nationalistsin the Iggos were influencedby the right-wingemigrephilosopher Ivan Il'in; Il'in and other philosophers and theologians of the emigration might have merited attention. Yet Russian messianism is a large theme, and Duncan hassucceededverywellin bringingtogethera greatrangeof material, and illuminatingsome of the longer-termpatternsin Russianhistory. School ofHistogy PHILIP BOOBBYER University ofKent atCanterbuy Garnett, ShermanW. (ed.).Rapprochement orRival?y?.: Russia-China Relations ina Changing Asia.Russia and EurasiaBooksfrom the Carnegie Endowment. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 2000. x + 437 pp. Maps. Notes. $24.95 (paperback). SINCE the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a remarkable transformationin relations between Russia and China. From conditions of extreme hostility and ideological enmity after the Sino-Soviet split, a rapid I72 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 and peaceful process of normalization has taken place. Borders have been demarcated, troop reductions and confidence-building measures have been undertaken, trade and commerce has begun to flourish, and, perhaps most strikingly,China and Russiahave assumedan increasinglycommon view and understandingof post-Cold Warinternationalpolitics. The strategicpartnership which has been the fruitof this increased level of cooperation is viewed by both countries as a force for the 'establishment of a new international order', which would undermine 'unipolar' US hegemony and institute a 'multipolar'internationalsystem. This convergence in geopolitical outlook cannot, though, disguise the underlying reality of the relationship which involves an even greater transformationin terms of the relative balance of power. While China has continued to engage in fast economic growth, Russia has suffered a catastrophicdecline in economic output combined with a markeddeterioration in social, political and military capabilities. The consequence has been one of the most striking shifts in the history of international economic relations. While in the I980S the Soviet Union had a GDP that was greater than China, now China has five times the GDP of the Russian Federation. Even in termsof GDP per capita, it is expected that China will surpassRussia in the next fiveto ten years.This bruteeconomic realityhighlightsclearlythat China is a risingpower and thatRussiais in a processof deep decline. These two differing,if complementary, featuresof the recent evolution of Sino-Russian relations are at the heart of the various contributions to Rapprochement andRivaly. Sherman W. Garnett has performed an...

Memory, Indestructible as the Eternal Metals: Three Russian Views

Memory, Indestructible as the Eternal Metals:Three Russian Views Caryl Emerson (bio) How do the metals come to be assigned to cultural eras, and what is the minimal geological formation necessary for marking a boundary? A Golden Age inaugurates and blesses; Ages of Iron and Bronze are savage fallings-away from that mythical center, but a Silver Age – like the spiraled terraces of Purgatory Mountain – has more hope in it; it suggests a cyclical return, a reflective source of light that is cooler, more derivative and deliberative, but still indisputably precious. The parameters of Russia's Silver Age, both spatial and temporal, have proved most difficult to define. Rylkova confronts the issue head on, as a problem in redemptive memory and the reevaluation of times. Ambitious in its claims but not eccentric in its use of historical fact, revisionist but intuitively believable, her essay concludes by offering perennially good advice: that historians of culture must consider the status of a cultural period or event, no less than the events themselves, as historically conditioned, dynamic, and often deceptive. The essay is also pleasurably "undertheorized." It builds its case from the bottom up, out of primary sources and familiar opinions – but scrupulously arranged so as to unfold in their own time, independent of later reconceptualizations. It is Rylkova's thesis that the "Silver Age" and its precious aura did not exist as such while its practitioners were active and alive. There was simply Russian modernism, or Decadence: loud, creative, self-absorbed, already attracting passionate negative attention in the early 1920s from political radicals, cultural conservatives, and the modernists themselves. She reminds us of the miserable reception granted the writings of Sirin (the young Vladimir Nabokov), the sympathy for Berdiaev's post-revolutionary "crisis of humanism" lectures, the revived admiration for Tolstoi's hyperdidactic Ivan Il'ich as a model for the brave, new, purposefully non-aesthetic man of the 1930s, and the pervasive disgust for immoral art and artists that threads its way through the first two Soviet decades. Rylkova gives us, in effect, an early 20th-century cultural scene where the dyspeptic pronouncements of the 1909 Vekhi essayists were not outrageous or scandalous; they were mainstream. It was only when the baser metals of the Revolution began to be perceived as permanent, both in the Soviet Union and the diaspora, that Russian modernism was redefined out of moral naughtiness into a site of nostalgia. At this point it ceased to attach itself forward, to a liberating (although contaminated) avant-garde, and instead looked backward, to [End Page 501] a vanished and now chaste Golden Age. The "Russia we lost forever," its "forfeiture," had to be engineered. Throughout this redrawing of paradigms, Rylkova only rarely brings in a present-day critic or methodology to buttress her empirical evidence. She briefly mentions Clifford Geertz, whose essay on "Art as a Cultural System" makes the commonsensical point that cultures can evolve out of a literacy and lose the ability to see things as contemporaries saw them; later on, Cooley and Schwartz are cited as authorities for the observation that collective memory is energized through its ability to reconceptualize watershed events of the past. Her final theorist is Mikhail Bakhtin, who, in his writings on intercultural dialogue from the 1950s–70s, is credited with upgrading the Formalist idea of "estrangement" (ostranenie) into the more robust concept of "outsideness" (vnenakhodimost'). The latter term presumes evaluation, which the Formalists had always been loathe to touch; it allows us to draw definitive borders around others, rediscover them, measure ourselves in light of them, glorify them. Being outside – deeply and irrevocably outside, looking in on a corpse – triggers cultural memory in an intensely creative, life-restoring way. While Rylkova does well not to burden her piece with distracting theoretical speculation (her thesis does not need it), the commentator's temptation is great to gloss this essay with additional details from Russian theorists of culture who have addressed precisely Rylkova's concerns. Giving in to that impulse, I devote the remainder of these comments to the Silver Age dilemma Rylkova is describing as it might have been viewed by three eminent Russian thinkers who addressed the problem of historical memory...

Tolstoy's Use of Light and Dark Imagery in The Death of Ivan Il'ic

In a recent study of the aesthetics of Tolstoy, Rimvydas Silbajoris asserts that an examination of the use of detail in Tolstoy is central to an understanding of his art, writing. secret of his power as a writer often resides in his ability to use an artistic language in which each single semiotic sign reveals itself upon observation as a microcosm of the whole (Silbajoris, 109). As Edward Wasiolek has pointed out, the significance of detail increases in the later, shorter works.1 This paper will formally analyze Tolstoy's use of light and dark imagery in one of his later stories, The Death of Ivan Il'iN. It will be shown that more or less conventional images of light and dark serve a narrative function in the text, entering systematically into an extended, figurative motif which comes to reflect the text considered as a whole.

Signs on the Road of Life: "The Death of Ivan Il'ič"

Signs on the Road of Life: "The Death of Ivan Il'ič"

The Death of Ivan Il'ič: The Construction of the Theme; some Aspects of Language and Time

The Death of Ivan Il'ič: The Construction of the Theme; some Aspects of Language and Time

Time and Discourse Structure in “The Death of Ivan Il’ich”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeAbstractLe trait stylistique le plus éclatant, sur le plan narratif, de la nouvelle ‘La Mort d’Ivan Iliitch’ est sans doute l’opposition entre la progression linéaire du texte et la séquence chronologique des événements. Cette opposition permet la formulation d’une hypothèse initiale que le premier chapitre a subi une transformation en passant de la fin de la nouvelle tout au début. Pour mettre à l’épreuve cette hypothèse et, de même, pour déterminer le principe d’organisation de la structure narrative de la nouvelle, le texte est soumis à une analyse structurale en utilisant la théorie de la grammaire du discours. Il est démontré que l’hypothèse initiale est soutenue par le parallèlisme frappant entre le contraste conceptuel HABITUDE : CONSCIENCE, un contraste qui est marqué, sur le plan temporel, par l’opposition passé: non-passé, et les modes narratifs employés dans les parties discursives discrètes du texte. De plus, la hiérarchie et l’arrangement linéaire des éléments discursifs sont dominés par un principe de répétition qui est, en effet, une variation en forme de “mirror-image” du thème conceptuel. Du point de vue de la structure narrative, ce principe détermine le caractère mixte du premier chapitre et, en dernière analyse, sa position et fonction dans la nouvelle.

The Structural Integrity of the Death of Ivan Il'ič

The Structural Integrity of the Death of Ivan Il'ič