M. Aldanov's essay "Vanna Marata" and the ways of character creation

The article deals with M. Aldanov's essay "Vanna Marata". The author underlines the essay's special position among his other texts devoted to political murders. Aldanov studies psychological types of the terrorist, the traitor, female fate paradoxes in politics and other situations rising in pivotal moments of human history. His personal versions of historical situations and famous personalities are created in several constant ways. The essay's title demonstrates the unique nature of assassination model; a domestic item bears the symbolic meaning and accumulates tragic paradoxes of terror and French history in general. Marat's image is created not just by means of direct author's narration but with the help of private life situations, his relations with the woman in love with him as well. Charlotte Corday is the character of a similar importance. Aldanov provides her psychological portrait and tries to find out the reasons of her act. The apposition of essay's historical situations and cultural (literature) texts and names is one of the ways Aldanov explores the historical events. Mentioning an episode from Dostoevsky's Idiot and Corneille as Corday's ancestor includes the two characters in the cultural paradigm of Russian and European history. Marat's fate becomes a valuable indicator of connections between Russian and European political history. The structure of the essay is determined by several author's intentions: to prove danger from myths borne by collective consciousness, to highlight European revolution tragedies as a matrix of further historical events, to declare repetitiveness of events and types of personality as a universal principle of civilization development. The final part of the essay contrasts in tone with the previous parts as it is devoted to rapid changes in collective ideology when a yesterday hero becomes today's villain, his ashes are thrown out of Pantheon and his monument is demolished. That arises the idea of a simulacrum which hides the genuine tragedy of historical personality. Among the themes analyzed is embalmment and transformation of history and its participants into profanation. The essay "Vanna Marata" is connected with other texts related to French political history; foremost, "Sent-Emilionskaya Tragediya" (1937) and "Fouquier-Tinville" (1938). Though written later, they continue Aldanov's reflection on fates of political characters.

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