Rehabilitation of Parody (the Late Tolstoy as Moliere’s Hero). The First Article

Leo Tolstoy’s novels of the 1880s consistently remove the key idea of the family from his previous worldview. Pozdnyshev, the hero of “The Kreutzer Sonata”, transfers the demonism of “carnal love” to the family, justifying it by saying that the meaning of humanity’s existence has been exhausted. The antecedents of such a position in the literature of Modern times allow to distinguish between ideological, social and psycho-logic of the Tolstoy’s position. One of them looks like the spiritual path of the end-to-end hero of J.-B. Moliere’s comedies, an aging bourgeois who enters into a late or second marriage. Moliere closed this path with the fi gure of Orgon from the comedy “Tartuff e” (1664, 1669), whose credo in the fi rst act precedes the Pozdnyshev’s position: since “the world is... a dunghill”, you cannot cherish either your wife or children. Argon comes to such assessment of the world by the movement of his self-esteem, which he embodies in his rogue idol Tartuff e and which is clarifi ed by the behavior of the similar characters in other Moliere’s comedies. The stages of this assessment of oneself and the world are the desire to regain youth in a second marriage with a young woman; the fear of approaching old age and his wife’s infi delities; the desire to perpetuate his power over her with the authority of the church; the personifi cation of a religious idea in its “ideal” representative; the tender deifi cation in him of own frailty, old age and passing away; the beginning of the passing away by leaving loved ones who do not allow to stay alone with the existence of life and death.