“Through the thickness of the catastrophe”: the motif of finding the heavenly fatherland in the estate myth of M. Prishvin and S. Durylin in the diaries of the civil war period (1918-1922)

The article discusses the narrative of finding a genuine “Home” in the diaries of M. Prishvin and S. Durylin during the Civil War (1918-1922). The autobiographical estate myth refracts the real facts of the biography in the eschatological dimension of the war as a spiritual battle in the human soul. If the first part of the ego-narrative is dominated by the motives of decay and loss, immersion in the liminal space of death (duel with the “enemy”) and their correlates in the images of the “dead house”, “house-prison”, room in the “demonic shell”, then in the second part is dominated by the semantics of overcoming war in the spiritual pursuit of the city of God, common with all the Heavenly Fatherland. Two groups of motives form a “mystical plot scheme”, which is based on an “event scheme of initiation”, where the culmination is a “mystical transition” - overcoming an invisible barrier: “the veil of the world” (Prishvin), the “demonic shell” covering the “world” (Durylin). In the interpretation of the writers, the transformation of the prodigal son is a repentant “expansion of the soul”, the path from individuality (“ego” - “dead house”; soul - house in a “demonic shell”) to personality (“I am in everyone and everything”; “I am in God”). The Kitezh myth and its mystical motif of the return (conversion) of the soul to God creates a “heterotopy of the estate”: through the space of the disintegrated world (“a ruined house” - “a destroyed temple” - “a cursed Russia” - “a devastated soul”), at the moment of repentant insight, a holistic landscape of the “world in God” opens up - a many-sided whole, a council of persons, an invisible church of the living and the dead, the whole world as the house of God. The motive of return is transformed into the motive of overcoming orphanhood - finding a spiritual homeland (Heavenly Fatherland), calling the “priesthood” in the world.