On the question of “Returning to Yourself” in the literature of the stagnation era

Abstract

In the article we address various aspects of personality formation in the Soviet realities of the second half of the twentieth century. The main focus is on “return to oneself”, which is closely linked to the concept of internal self-organization. The article focuses on social changes in the Soviet ideological field of the 1970s. Volodymyr Orlov managed to make a successful “mold’ of the changes of that time, to outline ways of preserving morality and humanity under ideological pressure. The revelation of “return to oneself” in the novel “Altist Danilov” takes place in several areas – the search for gender, social, humanistic, ethical self-identification. A special role in revealing the character of the protagonist is played by music, which focuses cross-cultural research around aesthetic discourse. Ethical investigations of the protagonist unfold against the background of the Soviet reality with the elements of mysticism, which significantly expands the author's possibilities in the application of various artistic techniques. These “discoveries” include the balance between the protagonist's limitless possibilities and the “power of discipline”, which severely limits him -the power from the Soviet system, the “otherworldly system” and the voluntary submission to the personal spirit of a "reflective intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century”. In the article, we demonstrate Volodymyr Orlov's efforts to elicit sympathy precisely for the human manifestations of characters outside the influence of the Soviet system. This partly explains the phenomenon of “internal emigration” in a totalitarian system. Examples of the artistic context of the author's search are given, which explain the phenomenon of power and the search for ways to avoid the loss of personal inner space. One of these ways is the cultivation of individual character traits that resist the blurring of the boundaries of the influence of the external world on the internal cultural world. This internal resistance to the obsessive pressure of authoritarian society allows us to consider it as the core of a peculiar concept of “finding oneself.”