Nature in the publicistic essays of Victor Astafiev of 1960s - 1990s

On the material of the sketches and essays the views of V.P. Astafiev on nature are reconstructed. The system of these views is considered in its development from the early 1960s until the 1990s. In the analysis of poetics the logic of the natural world picture constructing is revealed. The holistic conceptual understanding of the structure and characteristics, conditions and relations of nature develops basing on the immediate experience of sensual-emotional perception, expressed in landscape sketches, by synthesis, theoretical generalization of visual images accumulated in the memory. There also develops the understanding of nature as a living space, of universal laws, and of absolute bases of a harmoniously organised space. V. Astafiev refers to nature understanding as an artist. The picture of a natural world is not built rationally and logically, but spontaneously. It consists of immediate life observations. A personalised author-narrator, identical with the writer's personality, is localized at the point in space and time. He perceives the natural processes immediately, synchronously with their implementation. The position of an observer provides a view of concrete natural toposes as a whole, in the fullness and unity of their patterns and manifestations, conditions and relations. Natural spaces are described as biogeocenoses that unite living organisms (plants and animals) and non-living components (landscape). The essays express the idea about the order and harmonic organization of nature. The fundamental principles of the world picture, which begins in childhood, is mother nature. As the writer of a Russian village, which experiences the decay of the traditional way of life, he does not feel harmony in the social reality, but finds it in the organization of nature. However, he finds this harmony only ''here and now'', in the phenomenal manifestations (conditions and processes) of nature, which makes the landscape shape its image. While the structure and features of nature in V. Astafiev's world picture are open, available to the human, its inner essence, the ultimate foundations of natural existence remain hidden from him. The limited possibilities of immediate experience define the value of intuition. The phenomenal only opens the secret of natural existence, representations about which so far are limited by feelings and emotions. The picture of the natural world is built as a chain of associations (allusions, analogies), which cause specific images of perception (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile). From the second half of the 1980s the way of nature perceiving changes, acquiring a figurative-conceptual form. Basing on categorisation, on speculative conversion of the visual and sensual perception images to the concept the holistic picture of the natural world develops, which includes the understanding of the structure and characteristics, conditions and relations of nature as a living space, the understanding of the general laws (cyclical renewal and evolution, struggle for existence) and the absolute foundations of existence (eternity, God).

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