Poetics of essay in early works of Sergey Zalygin

The article analyses the poetics of S.P. Zalygin's essays''At the Spring of This Year'' (1954) and ''Awakening of the Giant'' (1959). The analysis reveals theauthor's world picture in the early stage of creation, the system of views on the Human, Society andNature, specifying the initial moment of the Outlook evolution.The poetics of essays is dictated by short-term aspects (social task), and the peculiarities of theauthor's world outlook in the 1950s.The world picture, embodied in the poetics, is not typologically different from essays of 1950s -early 1960s (''Contemporaries'' by B. Polevoy, ''New Horizon'' by I. Ryabov, ''In the Name of theFuture'' by B. Galin, ''District Everyday Life'' by V. Ovechkin, etc.), and the pathos corresponds to thesocial atmosphere of the epoch: the reality is treated as social and public, interpreted as the reality ofthe common mission and disclosed ethically through the relations between the characters. Thecommon mission in the style of the official ideology and the emotional atmosphere of the epoch isunderstood as the creation of a perfect society. The conflicts in the plot show the process of moral selfdeterminationof the person in respect of the super-personal whole (the collective). Involvement / noninvolvementin the process is the criterion of author's evaluation of the characters. The person hasvalue only through the collective and in the collective that gives sense to individual existence.Genetically such a picture of the world goes back to the story of the 1930s, when the tasks of thestate accelerated modernization demanded the image of the ''epic'' world, with its pathos of struggleand overcoming. But from the middle of the 1950s the author's position is deprived of dogmatism andintolerance; it tends to analytics; the image of the enemy disappears.In Zalygin's outlook there is still no understanding of the real complexities of life and the human.Society appears as a mechanism, the constituent elements of which (individuals and social groups)cause the general movement. Expressions of the human are limited to the fulfillment of socialfunctions. Natural reality appears as the space for social action, and is interpreted as the object oftechnological transformation. The writer's viewpoint on the reality defines the utopianism of thinking.It is formed in the 1930s and is based on a conscious belief in the possibilities of rational organizationof life.The complication of the world picture occurs in early 1960s. Year 1961 is the turning point, when''Novy Mir'' publishes the article ''Writer and Siberia''. The work forms the natural philosophy basis:the ontological laws of existence in a natural space are opened; the philosophical understanding of thehuman nature, his place in existence contributes to the gradual overcoming of social and technocraticillusions.

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