Russian literature of the 1830-1840s. "Awaiting a hero"

On the eve of the 1840s the question of a new hero arose in the Russian literature. The search of it becomes one of the characteristic features of the time. The most prominent writers of the epoch, such as A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol, M.Yu. Lermontov, were involved in this process. Apparently, the problem of a hero is an everlasting one in literature, but the basic parameters of a hero and its character have always been obvious and have never led to polemics. The controversy could arise exceptionally in the area of some esthetic-related questions: which of the considered figures correlates more adequately with the generally accepted hero conception? Or, which of the historical personalities satisfies the requirements of the conception? It was not in the area of the questions characteristic for the mid-19th century: who is the hero and where to find him? In the given article the intellectual tension felt in the Russian literature of the 1930-1940s is symbolically designated as the atmosphere of "awaiting a hero". The contemporary literature hero became an object of wide polemics. The spirit of the literature epoch was most strikingly expressed by V.G. Belinsky in the phrase "abyss of faces...<...> but no hero, no heroine" ("A Look at the Russian Literature of 1847"). "Awaiting a hero" is the state when neither men of letters, nor critics can definitely answer the question of who the contemporary hero is, and the writers try to figure him out rather than imagine him. The Russian literature hero actualized in the 1830-1840s is an assertion of impossibility of a deed, uncertainty and insuperability of his place in the events of the being. But the historical reasons for the crisis of the deed in the Russian literature of the epoch are not in the new hero himself, but in the rapidly changing architectonics of the world where the hero's deed was to be made. It is this deep and yet undescribed tectonic process that formed "the abyss between the motive of the deed and its product" (M.M. Bakhtin). It is a phenomenon that showed itself in the strained "atmosphere of awaiting a hero" that characterized the situation in the literature of the epoch.

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