Marcus Aurelius and the Ancient Philosophical Ideas in Victor Pelevin's Novel The Life of Insects

The article discusses the philosophical aspect of Victor Pelevin's novel The Life of Insects, which embraces the system of characters, individual collisions and spatial images, as well as the development of the author's philosophical themes. From the position of comparative philosophy, the author turns to the literary study of a number of contemporary worldview problems. To verify their validity, these problems are considered in the context of two philosophical discourses: ancient and eastern. The ideas of the classical philosophy of antiquity and Marcus Aurelius are connected in the novel with the images of two fireflies or moths Mitya and Dima. These characters represent different manifestations of the same consciousness. Mitya is immersed in existence, Dima manifests the future state of Mitya's consciousness. Their relationship is organized as a relationship between a student and a mentor, which refers us to the ancient issue of self-education, impossible without the authoritative Other. By manifesting a philosophizing consciousness, these two characters are contrasted with the other characters of the novel. The philosophical dialogues of these characters are given in the context of the ideas of ancient philosophy and Marcus Aurelius. They address the problems of ontology, anthropology, gnoseology, ethics. In the plot of the novel, the process of self-determination is embodied: Mitya makes his existential choice between light and darkness, between true and false modes of existence, reveals a solution to the problem of the freedom of choice and will. After initiation, he creates his own poetic text “In Memory of Marcus Aurelius”. The text of the poem appears as an act of the metaphysical will of a free man of an intelligible world, and rationality in the novel serves as the basis for bringing together the philosophical ideas of antiquity and of I. Kant. The collision of cognition and self-cognition is completed in the novel by the disappearance of Dima and the transformation of the divided consciousness into one: the character acquires the full name of Dmitry. The legacy of Marcus Aurelius and the philosophical ideas of antiquity turned out to be necessary for Pelevin to study the possibility of an existential breakthrough of an individual person to the truth under the conditions of modern mass civilization. The leading role in the comparison and dialogue of various philosophical discourses (ancient and eastern) belongs to the ancient one, in the center of which is Reflections by M. Aurelius. The actualization of the loss of the center, the relativism of this discourse in a post-classical situation indicates a return to antiquity in the search for ethical pillars in a support-free world. However, admitting the possibility of individual enlightenment, the general concept of the novel implies the author's pessimism and skepticism in assessing the capabilities of humanity (the entomological aspect of the novel) since there is no common good, no rationality; life is irrational, and the individual truth acquired by the hero does not change the general state of the world.

Keywords

Authors

References