Concepts “Messianism” and “Chosenness” in Vasily Aksyonov’s phantasmagoria novel Voltairian Men and Women: A Historical and Cultural Context

The article considers cultural concepts “messianism” and “chosenness” as interrelated and interdependent constants of a utopian type of consciousness. Their reflection in Russian literary discourse is presented in a diachronic aspect of the development of Russian and European cultures based on the material of Russian and foreign literature involving religious and mythological sources, works on history, philosophy and sociology. The starting point in the conceptual analysis is Vasily Aksyonov’s phantasmagoria novel Voltairian Men and Women. Its main topic is thought leadership and freethinking. The authors of the article, as well as the writer, focus on the phenomenon of Voltaire as the messiah of the Enlightenment in their analysis. The intertextual design of the novel contains prospective and retrospective representation of the two utopian concepts. The main method, a diachronic analysis of the content of the concepts, is used in the form of centrifugal and centripetal excursions into the cultural, utopian, and historical context. The study of the intertextual design of the novel allows reconstructing the development of the two concepts and recording their traces in Russian literature as a reflection of global tendencies in the development of the utopian and formation of a national idea. The concept “messianism” as a supranational concept is considered first. Presenting the cultural and historical features of Voltaire as the spiritual leader of the 18th century, the authors turn to the history of the concept. The single line of precedence in the Russian utopias of the 18th century and in Voltairian Men and Women points to the common religious and mythological grounds for the concepts “messiah”, “chosen people”, and “Golden Age”-a Greek myth about life under Cronus. The manipulative character of the use of the myth for political purposes-the glorification of Emperor Augustus that Vergil supported-contributed to the formation of the concept “Messiah”, later complicated and developing into the concept “messianism” that employs the concept “chosen people”. Further, the analysis of Russian literary utopian discourse transfers to the concept “chosen people” (through the prism of messianism). Aksyonov’s text allows revealing the cultural and historical foundation for the image of Voltairian people-the “chosen people” of the Enlightenment in Russia. The analysed 21st-century novel sets the retrospective and prospective direction for readers’ reflection. Starting with the messiah and the “chosen people” (Voltaire’s realm of reason), Aksyonov leads readers to the ideas and images of other messiahs, the “chosen people”: engineers of technocratic utopias and the proletariat; “poets” and “physicists”, and spiritual leaders of the 1960 s; the so-called “creative people” and the intellectuals of the 1990s; the creative class of the era of consumption. The struggle of “innovators” for the right to make frames of the past, present and future determines the genre and stylistic peculiarities of utopias and anti-utopias.

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