The “old” intellectual in N.S. Tikhonov’s “Anopheles” (1930): the crisis of masculinity and the impossibility of a “second birth”. Article 1

The article is devoted to the restoration of literary and socio-political contexts of N.S. Tikhonov's novel ‘Anopheles”. It is shown that the work is clearly satirical in relation to representatives of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and meets one of the key tasks of the era of the first five-year plan (late 1928-1932) - “reconstruction of man”, “socialist alteration of human material” as a result of “reconstruction of the national economy”. The writer draws a caricature image of a man of the “old” formation, constructed from several literary sources. Among the probable ones are the legend of the pied piper from Hamelin, Danko from the story “The Old Woman Izergil” and the hero of Gorky's “Karamora”. The fictional “doctrine” about anopheles corresponds to the character, which is based on the misunderstood theory of Tolstoy's seduction, coupled with maxims characteristic of the masculine gender order of the turn of the century. In his theory, the hero reproduces hierarchical patriarchal logic, where a woman occupies a standard low position in relation to a man. His thesis is a reflection of the gender essentialism that has dominated for centuries, identifying the biological (gender) and the social (position in society). The fear of active femininity, implicitly presented in the theoretical calculations of the character, reflects the idea of a subordinate, passive position of a woman. This interpretation of femininity prevents the hero from being reborn in accordance with the demands of time.