Strategies of overcoming in artistic narratives

Representation of socio-cultural risks is a typical feature of Russian fiction. Writers saw the loss of identity (personal, national, class, etc.) as the most serious danger affecting all spheres of society to one extent or another. However, the pathos of anxiety is not the only feature of the “alarming” narratives, which also raises the question of strategies for overcoming threats. Such strategies are subdivided into actional strategies (external activity of the subject of counteracting threats) and inactional strategies (internal activity). This dichotomy, in turn, includes a number of special strategies that form opposition pairs: agonal one (an explicit struggle with threatening factors) and stoic one (sacrificial insubordination); projective one (change of the world order) and conservative one (antagonism to destabilization of the way of life); mobilization one (extroverted self-positioning of a subject, concentration of resource possibilities of a person or a collective as a response to emerging challenges) and illuminative one (introverted position, constructive immersion of the counteragent of threat into his or her inner world). The article deals with the works of the 19th - 20th centuries (The Captain's Daughter by A.S. Pushkin, Demons by F.M. Dostoevsky, Time, Forward! by V.P. Kataev, Doctor Zhivago by B.L. Pasternak, etc.), by the example of which the specifics of realization of these strategies in fictional narratives are shown. The typology proposed in this article has great theoretical potential and is likely to serve as a universal research paradigm serving the study of a variety of socio-cultural threats. As far as artistic discourse is concerned, the most significant appears to be the illuminative strategy, which correlates with the tasks of literary creation (enlightenment of the reader’s consciousness, acquisition of integral spiritual self-identification).