Lavrovsky’s «Input» in K. L. Khetagurov’s Comprehension of the Problems of Intellectuals and People

The history of Enlightenment thought of the North Caucasus in the 80-90s of the XIX century manifested a reorientation of the ideological beliefs, caused by the collapse of expectations for the civilizing mission of the tsarist government and its «educated bureaucracy.» Illusions of the «intellectual mentorship» as a form of a dialogue with the government and rational correction methods of administration in the region were replaced by a concept of a critical thinking personality as the main driving force of progress. The present article views the poetic interpretation and implementation of the theses of P. L. Lavrov’s theory of narodism in the creativity of K. L. Khetagurov within the context of socio-philosophical quest of the North Caucasian creative intelligentsia of that time. Purpose: analyzing the number of poems included in “The Ossetian lyre” collection (“Iron fandyr”) by Kosta Khetagurov for presenting a reasoned evidence that the postulates of the Russian ideologist of narodism P. L. Lavrov, and namely, the idea of “indebtedness” to the people, were perceived by the classic of the Ossetian literature as a personal moral, artistic and philosophical imperative. Methods: comparative contrasting and hermeneutic-interpretative methods were used in the study to understand the synthesis of the elements of the extra-textual reality and features of the poetics of the texts of the poems. Results: the study of the poems of “The Ossetian lyre” collection viewed as consistent reflections of the various stages of “critical thinking”, discussed by P. L. Lavrov, and enabled to identify these texts as a semantic and motivational unity structured in a certain way. Step transition from one type of consciousness to another (“Meditation” contains the idea of “justifying” the idle state lamenting isolation from the “soil”, in the “Hope” the thought is active and aimed at the process of creative and spiritual growth, and in the poem “If to... “- a searching, dynamic thought, at the level of dreams, ideas comes out to the synthesis of “one’s individual”, national and universal, worldly) contributes to the comprehension of the most important fragments of the poet’s artistic vision of the world, who in his poetry and public discourse considered himself as a citizen of the world (”The whole world is my temple, my love is my shrine / The overall universe is the homeland of mine!”). The core of this compositional and semantic unity is the idea of “paying the debt” to the people, clearly formulated by K. L. Khetagurov in his program poem “Commandment”. Discussion: The use of new interpretative approaches to the microcycle distinguished within the internal structure of the collection “The Ossetian lyre” as a kind of the author’s “dialogue” with philosophical theses put forward in the “Historical Letters” (1870) by P. L. Lavrov and enabled to advance a new reading of this cycle of poems, necessitating the correcting of intonation and semantic accents in them with the view of transferring attention from the traditional social dimension to the factor of personal development, and the growth phase of individual and social consciousness.

North Caucasian enlightenment, Kosta Khetagurov, P. L. Lavrov’s theory, idea of “an irredeemable debt”, types of critical thought, interpretation

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