Problems of studying the Christian aspects of the 20th-century Russian literature in the post-nonclassical era

The article discusses a range of topical issues of methods of analysis of the theoretical principles of interpretation of Christian issues in the 20th-century Russian literature. In the 1990s-2000s the problem of Christianity and Russian literature became the subject of a special study of a series of conferences on the post-Soviet period: the main approaches were outlined; presentations of the Soviet period were corrected; the question of the theoretical and methodological principles of the study of Orthodox literary discourse in modern and contemporary periods was raised. The paper addresses several problems. First, it corrects the notions of the place of the 20th-century Russian literature in the spiritual foundations of national literature. The value of the Russian literature in the last century is formed not only in the framework of the Orthodox literature and "Christ-centrism" (I. Yesaulov) of the Russian culture, which is a natural process of further secularization. However, this tradition is one of the core lines in the development of the Russian literature of the last century. Second, it clarifies the boundaries of the concepts of "Orthodox text" and "patristic tradition". The problems of competent interpretation of literary texts in the confessional aspect in terms of the functional use of the canonical pre-text and of the study of separate literary systems in their evolution are discussed. Third, it analyses the existing typology of specific texts in terms of the problem of literature and Christianity. The idea of two types of works in the literature of the previous century is developed: Orthodox discourse, in which the believing author and the protagonist have a lively sense of being in God (M. Dunaev), and mythopoetic discourse, reflecting the secularized world of Russian artists of the last century (modernism, postmodernism). Fourth, it raises the problem of spiritual and religious mission of Russian literature and ways of interpreting the situation in the multiplicity of research methods in the post-nonclassical era. Models of research strategies in modern philology are presented, in particular, the issue of the nature and characteristics of the methodology of the secular (scientific) and religious (theological) literary criticism. The conclusion is that the problem of Christian anthropology and contemporary literature is at the early stage of its development, as well as the questions of methodology of religious studies.

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