Concept of “happiness” in Andrey Bitov's prose (1960s-1980s)

The analysis of the emotional concept of “happiness”, which has been traditionally shifted to the periphery in the writer’s artistic world and not fully covered by literary studies, can become a weighty argument in the dispute about the “daytime” / “night-time” nature of Bitov’s works. The relevance of the article is connected with the need to revise the content and structure of this concept in Bitov’s texts of the 1960s-1980s. The purpose of the research was to use the method of conceptual analysis in order to study the process of interaction between universal and individual principles in Bitov’s interpretation of the happiness phenomenon and consider the uniqueness of the writer’s felicitous model of artistic existence. The study resulted in the conclusion that while staying on the border of aesthetic systems Bitov seeks to find a compromise between the concept of “manageable” happiness and the concept of indeterminacy of human destiny. Actualizing associative, symbolic and axiological fields of the felicitous concept, the writer is becoming more and more convinced of the legitimacy of hypothetical variants and unrealized turns in the representation of happiness. Bitov and his characters find genuine happiness in the opportunity to speak from different ideological positions and move from one identity to another.