THE CONCEPT OF «WAR» IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE XIX – EARLY XX CENTURY (M. Y. LERMONTOV, L. N. TOLSTOY, V. M. GARSHIN, L. N. ANDREEV)

IJASOS- International E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. VII, Issue 19, April 2021 THE CONCEPT OF «WAR» IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE XIX – EARLY XX CENTURY (M. Y. LERMONTOV, L. N. TOLSTOY, V. M. GARSHIN, L. N. ANDREEV) Olga Evdokimova1, Irina Ivanova2*, Larisa Lyapaeva3, 18 Nataliia Obzhogina4, Lyudmila Sarbash5, Svetlana Fedyay6 1 Chuvash State University, RUSSIA, 2 Chuvash State University, RUSSIA, 3 Chuvash State University, RUSSIA, 4 Sen. Lect., Chuvash State University, RUSSIA, 5 Chuvash State University, RUSSIA, 6 Chuvash State University, RUSSIA, *Corresponding Author Abstract The concept of "war" can be viewed as a landmark for understanding the picture of the world created by Russian writers during the XIX – early XX centuries. In the article, this concept is investigated in the dynamics of temporal and creative development based on the works of M.Y. Lermontov, L.N. Tolstoy, V.M. Garshin, in whose work the military theme occupies one of the main places, as well as L.N. Andreeva. The focus is on the poem by M.Y. Lermontov "Valerik", Caucasian and Sevastopol stories by L.N. Tolstoy, stories by V.M. Garshin, the story of L.N. Andreeva "Red Laughter". In the course of the analysis, the semantic components of the concept of "war" are highlighted, which are equally important for both the author and the reader. So, in particular, the concept of "war" is represented in the epic novel "War and Peace" in a wide semantic range: the patriotic thought about the war of liberation is combined with the understanding of its senseless cruelty and includes the philosophical and historical concept of the writer about the causes of the war, about "authorship” of a historical event. Based on the concept of concept, the authors of the article show that the chronotope of war is not limited to depicting historical events: it includes a content field associated with various moral and ethical aspects of the work. In the article, using the example of different types of literature (lyrics, epics) and genres (lyric poem, story, story, novel), as well as different periods of Russian literature, such meaningful antinomies as "life-death", "good-evil", dichotomy "man-nature" and the perception of insight – the spiritual and moral changes of man in war. Comprehension of various semantic facets of the concept of "war" in the work of M.Y. Lermontov, L.N. Tolstoy, V.M. Garshina, L.N. Andreeva gives grounds to show the commonality of views of these authors in understanding war as senseless cruelty both in the fate of a private person and in the fate of entire nations. As a result, the concept of "war" as a universal textual category allows one to see new semantic layers of a literary text in the works of Russian writers of the XIX – early XX centuries and to reveal new interpretations of it. Keywords: Russian fiction of the XIX – early XX centuries, the concept of "war", the antinomy of "life-death". 1. INTRODUCTION In the center of attention in the article is the concept of "war", the analysis of which makes it possible to reveal in the Russian literature of the XIX – early XX centuries a large content layer with characteristic motives, images, techniques and means of representation. The study of artistic concepts deepens the study of the peculiarities of the relationship between language, literature and culture, which makes it possible to show a kind of “multidimensionality” of the concept, as well as to trace its evolution in the context of both http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 49 IJASOS- International E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. VII, Issue 19, April 2021 historical and artistic time. In linguistics and literary studies, there are different definitions of the term "concept". So, for example, D.S. Likhachev believed that the concept is the result of a collision of the dictionary meaning of a word with a person's personal and national experience (Likhachev, 1997). This idea is confirmed by a number of specific linguistic studies (Romanova, Fedorova, 2017). Researcher N.V. Volodina focuses on the cultural significance of the content, the semiotic and mental nature of the concept (Volodina, 2010). The most general understanding of the concept as a “mental formation” that conditionally replaces an indefinite set of objects of the same kind was formulated by Y. V. Fomenko (Fomenko, 2004). In literary criticism, the term concept means content that, through the prism of the author's vision, is realized in the semantic-associative context of a literary work (Evdokimova, Lyapaeva, Fedyai 2018; Evdokimova, Ivanova, Lyapaeva, Obzhogina, Sarbash, Fedyai, 2020; Sarbash, 2020; Zaitseva, 2011). In this regard, an important characteristic of a concept in literary criticism is its dialogic nature, that is, both the writer and the reader participate in its creation, whose task is to "complete" the content of the concept, fill it with new meaning. Since everyone has their own cultural experience, the concept always leaves room for conjecture, which allows you to reveal its semantic components. In our case, the concept makes it possible to show how the tradition of depicting war in all its content-richness and, above all, its philosophical and moral components, was formed in Russian literature of the XIX – early XX centuries. The relevance of this article is determined by the fact that "war" invariably remains one of the constant themes of world culture, since "war" in its broad universal understanding again and again attracts attention. Each new generation reveals previously unknown facets of this problem, but one question remains unchanged – what are the causes of the war and what are its consequences, why there is a confrontation between “ours” – “aliens” and the “unconquered past” (Ivanova, Fedyay, Obzhogina, Evdokimova, Sarbash, Lyapaeva, 2020). The purpose of the undertaken research is to show how in Russian literature writers of different generations depicted not only and not so much the wars themselves, but aspired to reveal universal human problems caused by the state of war, to understand why exactly war is becoming the only way to resolve conflicts, and most importantly – what are the consequences of war in the mind and soul of a person. 2. METHODOLOGY Analysis of the scientific literature on the topic of the article made it possible to determine the methodological foundations and conceptual ideas of the study. The focus of the work is the concept of "war", which makes it possible to reveal one of the most complex and ambiguous problems in its interpretation in fiction – the problem of war and its consequences in human life. The contrastive-comparative method of research and the systematic approach were used at the stage of studying the theme of war in the works of Russian writers of the XIX – early XX centuries, due to which the most general patterns were revealed in understanding war as the greatest human tragedy, the consequences of which are virtually in (...truncated)