Type Of Hero Research Articles

Three questions to start the sociological study of heroism

Despite the understandable and predictable lack of sociological interest in the issues related to heroism, the search for clear and unambiguous conceptual and empirical definitions of the hero in the contemporary society seems to be a relevant sociological task, especially under the current pandemic which made the criteria of heroism interesting for the wider public. The authors briefly outline the main aspects of the traditional scientific interpretations of heroism as presented in the social-cultural narratives worldwide, and proceed to the issues that constitute the field of the sociological studies on heroism. The first research question is not so much a single definition of the hero as types of heroes based on social representations of when and how heroes reveal themselves in decisions and actions. The authors rely on the traditional typologies of heroes usually based on the psychological aspects of heroic thinking and behavior to suggest a sociologically relevant typology based on both literature and the Russian public opinion polls. This typology implies answers to the questions of why the society needs heroes and what makes someone a hero in the eyes of the society, and allows to better understand and to more precisely define the false/pseudo/antiheroism. The second research question is about the sources of images and understanding of heroism, which focuses on the mass media and especially cinemas potential to represent certain social practices as heroic and to construct heroic images. The third research question is about the possibilities of the empirical sociological study of the types of heroes and their representation in the media (cinema). The authors argue that sociology should use its own methods (in a combination with techniques for studying the audiences perception of movies) - content analysis and surveys, especially the unfinished sentences technique, and provide some examples of how this can be done, for instance, to compare the social representations of a real hero and a movie hero among different age groups and generations. The authors conclude with mentioning a new issue associated with heroism, which became evident under the pandemic - changes in the social representations of heroism determined by heroization of healthcare workers due to their selfless fight against the coronavirus epidemic.

Ретросериалы об артистах советской эстрады: между конвенциями, прошлым и реальностью

The article deals with the dramaturgical and aesthetic patterns of the Russian TV series of the 2000s–2010s, which provide insight into the lives of famous Soviet pop music artists. The main characters in the biopics studied were inspired by Leonid Utyosov, Pyotr Leshchenko, Lyubov Orlova, Anna German, Lyudmila Zykina, Valentina Tolkunova, Alla Pugacheva, Lyudmila Gurchenko, Edita Piekha, Valery Obodzinsky and Muslim Magomaev. The article gives an overview of the similarities in the development of historical and biographical film genres in Hollywood and Soviet cinema. Moreover, a brief introduction to Soviet films about musicians is provided. The main part of the research is devoted to the issues of adaptation of Hollywood conventions of the music biopic genre In Russiania. Through the interaction of the Soviet past, Hollywood standards and contemporary Russian realities, the specific features of different narration types are revealed, the issue of authenticity is considered, and the status of pop music in the past and present is outlined. In addition, the types of dramatic conflicts and types of heroes are analyzed, questions of the commercial component in relation to Soviet popular culture are raised.

ANALYSIS OF THE STORIES OF U. HAMDAM IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN UZBEK LITERATURE OF NEOREALISM

The article is devoted to the problem of the evolution of the modern hero and types of heroes in the modern Uzbek literature of neo-realism. The poetics of neo-realism marked by a combination of descriptive concreteness and object precision with expressive and lyrical often-symbolized words; characterized by a weakening of narrative connections by strengthening the lyrical beginning and in-depth psychologism. Neo-realism in Uzbek literature, while possessing national features, in terms of poetic and stylistic orientation, is fundamentally different from neo-realism in Russian and Western literature. The works of A. Yuldashev and U. Khamdam are the bearers of this line in Uzbek prose. Along with the synthetic nature of the texts of these writers, there is a feature that unites them all — the desire of prose writers not to paradox, but to reality. The purpose of this article is to consider the philosophical perception reflecting the state of mind of modern man through the prism of the perception of the literary hero in the Uzbek literature of the XXI century. Ulugbek Hamdam in the stories «Камень», «Река души моей» (“The Stone", “The River of My Soul”) with the help of conventionality and signs-symbols, as well as building the work on the basis of functional relationships, builds his author’s concept on the material of everyday life. Abdukayum Yuldashev in the stories «Пуанкаре», «Близнецы» (“Poincare”, “Twins”) having a rich style arsenal, also works at the interface of realism and neo-realism. The article attempts to analyze the main features in the typology of the hero in the stories of U. Hamdam in the context of the traditions of new realism.

THE FORMATION OF NEW ARTISTIC TRENDS IN THE WORKS OF RUSSIAN WRITERS OF CHECHNYA

The article considers the process of formation and the emergence of new art movements and ways of depicting reality and ideological tendencies in the work of Russian writers. Illuminated the concept of Russian-speaking writers of the second half of the twentieth century, formulated in the statement that the ultimate expression of artistic vision is achieved in prose. The theoretical part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the level of development of the Russian-speaking Chechen prose, in the context of the traditions and experience of Russian literature. The practical part is based on the works by V. Makarov, «field camp» and M. Lukin, «the Field of 6 honor». This paper analyzes the aesthetic and ideological orientations of the writers defined the principles of creating and shaping the image of a new type of hero.

Goths, Huns, and The Dream of the Rood

Abstract This article argues that two poems concerned with legends of Goths and Huns, the Old Norse Hlǫðskviða and the Old High German Hildebrandslied, provide an illuminating literary context for The Dream of the Rood. The critical utility of these poems inheres in their ability to delineate more precisely the intertextual relationship that obtains between The Dream of the Rood and the vernacular tradition of heroic poetry. When the poem is read in this context, Christ appears not to be vaguely heroic, but to be modelled on a specific type of hero: the intransigent youth who compels his unwilling adversary to fight him and ultimately take his life. The figures of Hlǫð and Hadubrand are shown to constitute the most relevant extant realizations of this type, while related examples from Waltharius and the Finnsburg fragment are adduced in order to confirm that the type was both traditional and widespread.

Mental Health in John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down

Mental health and illness have been tackled and theorized over centuries in various cultures. Mental health possesses a complex history in being used for various causes and perceptions due to the needs of a certain group of people. Characters who develop mental illness, in classic novels, usually go crazy, or they are neglected, they die and things turn to be well for the other sane characters, or even they commit suicide. The trope of dismissing characters with mental health issues is unnerving in classic literature. Thereby, it was not possible for characters suffering from mental illness to be any type of hero since they were frequently killed off or called villainous. The depiction of mental health experiences in recent literature is realistic. People with mental illness can be the main characters or even the heroes of the story. They are aware of their mental illnesses and they upraise an admirable struggle against them. Though some characters die at the end of the stories, most of them find some happiness and become hopeful by the story’s conclusion. Mentally ill characters make progress and overcome their anxiety since they are accepted by their families, friends or societies. It is unnecessary for the characters to be cured or live without struggles, or even survive the tale. John Michael Green (1977, Indianapolis), is an American author and YouTube content creator, whose rapid rise to fame is due to ushering in a new era for contemporary, realistic, literary teen fiction. He sketched human health intelligently in his novels.  The publication of Green’s Turtles All the Way Down (2017) demonstrates the degree of the evolvement in literature. The young adult novel is one of the books that depict characters with mental health issues in a realistic and hopeful way. The significance of the book is due to its celebration of real-life arguments concerning a previously overlooked matter. The researchers attempt to prove that the mentally ill hero of the story is open about her illness and she puts up a fight against it instead of escaping from it. They show how the hero is portrayed in a realistic and cheerful way through depicting certain scenes in which the character tries to treat her illness and overcome it.  &nbsp

The heroic nature of the expert presenter: a practitioner's perspective

ABSTRACT In this article I explore the nature of the expert presenter character, in particular the relationship between that character and the person playing the role, and also between that character and the narrative structure of the episodes they present. I use Robert McKee's separation of ‘character’ and ‘characterization’ to explore how the presenter character can perform the same actions in different series, and yet be played by different presenters. I find that the presenter is a type of hero who achieves wholeness at the end of each episode once they have ‘discovered’ the knowledge. However, I find that there is a unique form of the hero's journey that takes place in some presenter documentaries where the presenter hands the ‘elixir’ of this knowledge to the viewer to take back to their real world, rather than the presenter returning to their world with it. To understand the nature of the presenter character I use my own experience as director of presenter documentaries, interviews with presenters I have worked with, and an interview with one of the producers of the landmark BBC series Simon Schama's A History of Britain (2000–2002).

The evolution of the images of the main characters in the process of Alexander Ostrovsky’s work on the comedy "The Forest" (based on the draft autograph of the play)

The proposed article assumes a continuation of the conversation about one of the most polemical texts by Alexander Ostrovsky, begun on the pages of this journal by Vladimir Tikhomirov, who in his article “Comedy "The Forest" by Alexander Ostrovsky: holding out for a hero. Experience of a commentˮ drew attention to the problem of evaluating the heroes of the comedy "The Forest" by critics of the 19th century. The genre-compositional features of the play, which included old and new types of heroes in familiar and new conflict collisions, acquired even more explicit outlines when referring to the manuscript sources of the play in the process of preparing the complete collected works of Alexander Ostrovsky. In our opinion, the reaction of the playwright's contemporaries, who did not see anything fundamentally new in the play "The Forest", is due, in particular, to the complex drawing of the images of the main characters, the concept of which took shape gradually. At the same time, the evolution of the characters of the heroes of the comedy had a direct impact on the formation of the author's intention. Also, the attempt to restore the general drawing of the author's work to create the characters of the main heroes of the play, to comprehend the specifics of the contradictions implicitly present in their images, is a logical continuation of the discourse begun earlier.

Author's Creativity in Modern Fiction (Based on Russian "Besoboi" Comic Series)

Linguistic creativity is currently attracting a lot of scientific attention. Such scientists as V. P. Korovushkin, J. Falojou, O. K. Iriskhanova, A. V. Galkina, and V. Z. Demyankov define linguistic creativity as a person's ability to create and use original, non-standard linguistic means and techniques, which is mainly used in personal discourse, i.e. in fiction narrative, everyday speech, or phatic discourse. The present research featured authentic linguistic creativity in the modern comic book series called "Besoboi". Authentic linguistic creativity means the author's ability to use and generate new original, non-standard linguistic means, and techniques, or to commit deliberate linguistic violations at various language levels in their own text. The research objective was to identify and describe linguistic means, techniques, and violations that make up the linguistic creativity in the text of the Russian comic book series "Besoboi". The author analyzed works by Russian and foreign scientists in the field of linguistic creativity, fiction, and language violations. The study was based on the methods of description, interpretation, comparison, and generalization. The author's linguistic creativity manifested itself in the comic book as an ability to generate innovative words and use such stylistic devices as parody, oxymoron, alliteration, lithotes, hyperbole, pun, etc. In addition, the text contained a lot of original idioms, epithets, and similes. However, there is a tendency to classify many of these expressive means and techniques as linguistic violations, grammatical or stylistic. The author's creativity also manifested itself in the fictional world, unusual plots, new types of heroes, e.g. a superhero with mystical abilities, demons, etc. All linguistic transformations on the level of phonetics, spelling, derivation, vocabulary, and grammar are deliberate, and so are the communicative deviations, as the author generates and uses them deliberately to achieve a certain effect.

MOTIV VJEČITOG MLADOŽENjE U DJELIMA S. PIŠČEVIĆA, J. IGNjATOVIĆA I LAZE LAZAREVIĆA: PARALELA

In this paper, the presence of the motif of the eternal groom is analyzed on the basis of four works by three authors: Memoirs by Simeon Piščević, two short stories by Laza Lazarević, The Wind and The German Girl, and the novel The Eternal Groom by Jakov Ignjatović. The paper deals with the analysis of individual repre- sentatives of the gallant type of heroes, as well as the observation of parallels in their common features that distinguish these characters and make them specific in the mass of others. We will demonstrate that the “eternal groom” type of hero is more widespread in Serbian literature than it seems. The type of hero who is a powdered suitor and a gallant lover is present

The literary hero and the types of heroes in modern Russian literature of the XXI century

The literary hero and the types of heroes in modern Russian literature of the XXI century

Игровая историософия А. Иванова: насилие формы и реабилитация смысла (на материале романов «Псоглавцы» и «Пищеблок»)

The paper analyzes the specificity of Ivanov’s historiosophy in two novels, “Psoglavtsy” and “Pishcheblok,” which are particularly interesting in this sense since in terms of genre, they do not correspond to the scale of historical issues as much as possible. These novels use the Gothic genre model, preserving the specifics of artistic space and type of hero. However, the generic Gothic time is replaced by historical time, experienced personally and subjectively. Meanwhile, a specific feature of Gothic time is retained, such as repetition, replaying a crisis moment of the past until the balance is restored. The author refuses a vector image of national history, forcing historical time to repeat itself in a cycle that resembles not only literary Gothic but also a computer game. It is not a question of bad infinity, but a game repetition, eventually leading to the “passage” of a crisis section of history. Thus, the struggle against genre form rehabilitates the content of national history. This principle also defines the history concept as a whole: A. Ivanov tends to see the historical process as including both the aggression of “form” (empire, state power, fate) and the defense of “content” (humanity revealed in individual choice), which, being opposed, are equally necessary for each other. Not only does the method based on the struggle and mutual necessity of form and content shape historiosophy in A. Ivanov’s novels, but it also organizes their artistic world. Ivanov’s game historiosophy is thus opposed to a postmodern game tending to destruct form and meaning.

TRENDS LITERATURE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY: «WORKING NOVEL», MINIMALISM, «NEW WAVE»

In Ukrainian literary studies, the idea was formed that «Western» literaturethe second half of the 20th century inherent aesthetics of postmodernism. However, the question arises: is this process homogeneous? Branching aesthetics of literary works 2 half of the 20th century is a scientific problem that needs to be understood. This is important because it requires a theoretical basis for the study of individual personalities / writers whose individual style have common points of intersection with general world artistic landmarks. The purpose of the article is to try to form a «system» of directions and currents of the the second half of the 20th century. This is the first approximation to a scientific problem. We used comparative-historical and typological methods, a systematic approach to achieve the purpose. In the postmodern era – the second half of the 20th century, the feeling of unconscious fear of the individual before the development of scientific technologies, before the nuclear threat is reflected. The trends of the «working novel», the current of «neorealism», the current of «new wave», the group of «minimalism» were formed in the literature of the the second half of the 20th century, they are not included in the discourse of postmodernism and post-avant-garde, because in these works there is a realistic chronotope. Here a new type of hero is formed and the moral and ethical problems of the «average» ordinary person, which does not succeed, are raised. The consciousness of the characters disintegrates, they are unable to comprehend either their ideas or the statements of others. They have no strength and energy at all. Boredom sometimes pushes them to action, which reflects the trends of the time. Intellectuals are presented as psychologically dead people who are incapable of anything, empty, doomed. The individualism of the hero raises the problem of isolation and disunity of people in a narrow domestic and broad historical context. The social problems of the «workers' novel», the «new wave», minimalism and neorealism contributed to the introduction and use of the border 20th-21th centuries by writers the realistic chronotope in the trend of «critical fiction»

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert

Reviewed by: Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert Elisabeth Ceppi (bio) Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination kenyon gradert University of Chicago Press, 2020 246 pp. Kenyon Gradert's Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination offers a fresh look at "Puritan origins" narratives that took hold during the antebellum period by examining how and why abolitionist writers invoked the Puritan past. The Mayflower's mythic landing at Plymouth Rock launched enduring narratives of American exceptionalism, promoted in generations of scholarship and renewed in cultural memory in solemn intonations of "Pilgrim's pride" and millions of construction paper hand-turkeys. Boosters and critics of this narrative agree that it enshrines "traditional" values. But, as Gradert asserts, origin stories can "bolster a revolutionary vanguard as much as a reactionary rearguard" (6). The 1619 Project bears out that claim, with its call to "reframe American history" around the powerful image of a ship arriving at Jamestown "bearing a cargo of 20–30 enslaved Africans" as "the country's very origin"; so does the backlash against it, including the effort launched by the National Association of Scholars to "refute" its account of American origins and "provide broader pictures of American history," called—what else?—the 1620 Project. In turn, as the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's "Our" Story: 400 Years of Wampanoag History exhibit exemplifies, the memory of Plymouth Rock need not enforce patriotic consensus. In Gradert's vivid account, abolitionists hailed "the Puritan spirit" as a discourse of spiritual liberty that not only legitimated dissent but also mandated revolt against tyranny and willingness (even zeal) to kill and die for a righteous cause. Puritan Spirits argues that this revolutionary abolitionist discourse of Puritanism has "bolstered a progressive politics of memory" (10), a counterpoint to "our usual memories of Puritanism as a conservative force for capitalism, prudery, exceptionalism, and empire" (6). [End Page 281] In the introduction, Gradert clarifies that Puritan Spirits is "not a study of 'the Puritan origins of abolition' but of the resonance of the Puritan past within the abolitionist imagination" (10). He curates a rich archive of antebellum writing about Puritans, but writings by Puritans and eighteenth-century post-Puritans mostly provide epigraph material; this is not a long history of Puritan or New England abolitionist rhetoric. Each of the six main chapters is a case study that clusters multiple figures together around a particular Puritan trope or aesthetic of "the abolitionist imagination" or a particular institutional site (the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; the poetry column of the Liberator). Certain themes and images cross chapters, including the use of Cromwell and Milton as heroic types; the tensions between "imagined" or spiritual warfare and actual violence; the different invocations of Puritans by gradualists and immediatists, pacificists and militants (and how the same figures tacked between these positions); the vitality of abolitionist print culture; the reckoning with white writers' "Saxonism, New England chauvinism, and (by today's standards) retrograde conceptions of race, gender, and religion" (42). The book coheres less as an argument than as thick description of an "episode in a long battle over our memory of the Puritans" (5). Gradert's archive provides early Americanists with material that can enhance our approaches to the antebellum period and provide context for the stories we tell about Puritans and their influence in our scholarship and our classrooms. Chapter 1 examines how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips invoked the Puritan past as a model of "spiritual heroism," casting radical abolition as redeemer in a providential narrative of American democracy in which "progress was inevitable yet revolutionary" (32). Gradert opens with the figure of John Brown, noting how frequently abolitionists used the word Puritan to praise him (17). As antislavery advocacy radicalized into "millennial zeal for America's bloodiest war," both Brown and Toussaint Louverture were hailed as "Cromwells"; Phillips deemed Louverture "a black Cromwell" (35). Claiming a revolutionary nonconformist heritage from their ancestors legitimated "a spiritual revolution that would salvage the heroic soul of democracy" (23). The chapter concludes with an intriguing reading of Emerson's "Voluntaries" as celebrating the leadership of the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, not just Colonel Shaw. Chapter 2 discusses...

“Hero” or “Anti-hero”? (The Problem of the Hero in the Works of M. Gorky in the Early 1920s)

The article considers one of the key elements of Gorky’s philosophical-ethical system – the concept of a “hero”, noting a profound difference between, on the one hand, the writer’s treatment of a “Person”, capitalized (Chelovek s bol’shoi bukvy), and meaning a full-fledged, creatively gifted and spiritually rich human being, and on the one hand, a “hero”, who was forced to recourse to violence and even murder under conditions of war and revolution. The article draws on Gorky’s works, all of which appeared in the summer of 1923: the essay “Hero” and two short stories – “The Story of the Hero” and “Caramora”. There, a heroic figure, being afraid of life and of other people, due to his egoism and existential loneliness, turns into an “antihero”, a traitor and a murderer. Our analysis of the poetics of these works makes it possible to align it to the poetics of modernism and the avant-garde. The notorious Gorky humanism, writ large during the revolutionary years and immediately after, brought to life works, where the writer protested against the “heroism” of soldiers and revolutionaries ready to kill their own people like enemies. In the 1930s, supporting the class ideology of Bolshevism, Gorky tried to “streamline” his works and wrote a series of “Stories about Heroes”, in which he celebrated the heroes of the Revolution and of the (Russian) Civil War. However, the stories turned out to be uncompelling and unmemorable; the images of the characters – schematic. Despite all his efforts, Gorky has never managed to create any significant works in which the valiant heroic type would be glorified.

Современное российское кино: экспертная характеристика

the rapid development of the film industry and its ever-increasing integration into the public and personal lives of people can expand the perspective of the living space of a modern person. In this article, the author considers modern Russian cinema as one of the most popular types of contemporary art and analyzes the products of its activities. The article is written on the basis of qualitative research – focus group discussions with experts in the field of cinematographic art and who have at least 3 years of experience in it. Based on the obtained data analysis, the author describe the products of Russian cinematographic art as a whole and consider its features, trends and development vectors. The author of the work classified the images of modern film characters based on the most discussed trends of modern Russian films and identified the properties characteristic of each type of hero.

Máquina amable, madre terrible

Proponemos una lectura del filme I Am Mother (2019), una de las producciones de ficción contemporáneas más celebradas de Netflix. A partir del concepto de arquetipo, analizamos desde la perspectiva de la mitocrítica cultural cómo el filme reconfigura los mitemas de la madre protectora, pero también los de la madre terrible, ya que el personaje robótico tiene un rol activo ante el destino que define los tipos heroicos y, así, la suerte de la humanidad. El tema se justifica por la actualidad de la distribución y consumo del cine en plataformas streaming, el cual representa un soporte eficaz para el texto mítico vivo y en circulación. Finalmente, ofrecemos la idea de que la eficacia del arquetipo que sustenta el texto fílmico se asienta más en los paradigmas míticos que en los científicos.

The Body as a Source of Meaning in the Culture of Remembrance: The Reputational Entrepreneurship of the Characters of Yugoslav National Heroes

The aim of this paper is to explore the patterns and meanings to be found in the characters of Yugoslav national heroes who met a violent death in World War II. These are heroes who belong to the type of martyr heroes, and their sacrifice is highly rated in all patriotic mythologies. Created to denote the heroism of the chosen, they have sublimated the meaning and symbolism of one remembrance of the war. The death of these national heroes will be analyzed through their official biographies, which served to represent the characters of the National Heroes of Yugoslavia and keep the heroic symbol-names ever present in the collective group memory. Through their characters, a specific wartime experience and the martyr’s death of the national hero who died for the freedom of the Yugoslav peoples, as seen by the victors in this war drama, were transmitted to the citizens of Yugoslavia. Various patterns of wartime heroism (warrior, martyr, leader heroism) were represented as national patriotism, and the fighters and martyrs of the war of national liberation were named. The characteristics of the reputational entrepreneurship of these heroes’ characters are specifically explored, taking into account the characteristics of the discourse through which they were interpreted and presented. On the other hand, the limitations of this discourse provide an opportunity to deconstruct certain common traits of a certain hero type and discover the latent meanings conveyed by the characters of Yugoslav national heroes as actors of a historical-political myth.

THE ONTOLOGICAL NATURE OF LAUGHTER IN THE DISCOURSE OF CRITICAL THEORY

The author of the article interprets laughter as a mechanism for legitimizing of power, the research is based on the critical theory of contemporary theoretical psychoanalysis and the phenomenology of culture. This thesis is an alternative to the general statement about laughter as an instrument for breaking with the repressive totality of being. The antithesis of the repressive nature of laughter in non-classical societies of the new totalitarianism contrasts with the thesis of the emancipatory nature of laughter in classical totalitarian societies. By the metod of comparative semiotic analysis the author differentiates the anthropological models of «Oedipus» and «Anti-Oedipus» as signs of the hegemony of patronism and liberal democracy, and distinguishes between the types of heroes («ironic» and «cynic») as indicators of carriers of creative and apropos «pro-power» laughter. The ironic personifies the positive symbolic incarnation of the trickster as the bearer of a taboo desire, the code of which is liberating (obscene) laughter, the power of which is effective in preserving the space of a false serious scene of classical (closed) censorship. The cynic embodies the image of a negative trickster, which responds to laughter of ironic by appropriating his laughter with the help of a system of power that reproduces itself through the stylization of counterculture (open censorship). Under such conditions, laughter, being neutralized, is either reduced to clowning or becomes an openly repressive strategy.

Andrey Mytishchev and Leon Ploshovsky as exponents of the type of hero without dogma in the prose of M.V. Krestovskaya and G. Senkevich

This article examines the characteristic type of hero in the literature of the epoch of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries and addresses a little-studied plot from the history of Russian-European literary ties of this period. The author focuses on two works: the novel by the Polish classic G. Senkevich "Without Dogma" (1890) and the story "The Confession of Mytishchev" (1901) by the half-forgotten Russian writer M.V. Krestovskaya, whom acquaintance with the book of an older contemporary made a strong impression. Both works contain a number of parallels at the level of composition, the way of speech organization of the narrative and the plot itself, but at the root of their connection lies attention to a new type of European man, generated by the epoch of the end of the century and suffering from its "diseases".The author of the article compares the main characters of the works of Senkevich and Krestovskaya — Leon Ploshovsky and Andrey Mytishchev — as representatives of the type of hero-skeptic, hero without dogma, whose appearance in literature was an organic stage of the evolution of the hero-individualist. Time has put its own questions before him, in particular, about the need to be guided by moral principles and follow any dogmas. The named works of Russian and Polish literature of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries are placed in a single historical and literary context for the first time, and their main characters are considered as vivid exponents of the type of European man of that time. The appeal of the modern reader to these artistic images makes it possible to better understand the cultural, historical, philosophical and social prerequisites for the appearance of carriers of such a worldview in the late XIX — early XX century. This determines the novelty and relevance of this study.