Romanova E. The discourse of love in XVIII-XX centuries Russian literature

The dissertation provides a comprehensive critical account of the discourse of love in the Russian literature of ХVIII-ХХ centuries; it is for the first time that the discourse of love in literature is observed as an integral and consistently developing narrative structure - "the Text of Eros". The author argues that the "meanings of love" in the history of Russian literature were consecutively referred to the notion of personality; to the utopian projects of the social relations rearrangement being regarded metaphorically as an ideal family relations model; to the realm of ontology marking the opposition of "cruel voluptuousness", that masterfully enslaves the personality by the generic instinct, and love that reveals the value the Other by way of the victim of egoism. The historiosophical theories of the Silver Age regarded love, transformed either mystically or on the social class bias, as a means of conciliar/communal unity of mankind. Eu. Zamyatin's anti-utopian novel "We" is considered to be the beginning of the deconstruction of the modernistic "meanings of love"; the anti-historiosophical trilogy by a postmodernist writer Vladimir Sorokin that tends to be the re-thinking of the Silver Age concepts considering the XX c. tragic history is argued by the author of the dissertation to be the conclusion of the modernistic project of the "transfiguration" of love in the history of Russian literature.