Poetics of the Russian world by Ivan Shmelev

The article discusses the underlying causes of a new wave of axiological rejection of I. S. Shmelev, which, as the author of the work demonstrates, has a negative attitude towards the image of historical Russia, depicted in the writer’s top works: “Praying Man” and “The Summer of the Lord.” At present, there is a tendency of academic reduction of the religious (Orthodox) dominant idea of the late Shmelev in the modern studies of his work, which is motivated by the correction of “one-sidedness” in the works of non-Soviet researchers and their post-Soviet followers about the writer. The author analyzes the poetics of the writer, highlights the dominant concepts of this poetics. Although the article does not only review the writer’s literary texts, it emphasizes that the Christian tradition, in which Shmelev’s artistic work is rooted, does not manifest itself separately from his poetics (in the “worldview,” journalistic, critical, epistolary texts), but does so in the poetics of his works of art. The poetics of the late Shmelev in the great time of Russian culture seems to contain the national image of the Russian world. It demonstrates how exactly artistic time and space in the writer’s works are deeply connected with the fundamental categories of Orthodox consciousness.