BOOK SERIES "LIFE OF REMARKABLE PEOPLE" IN THE CREATIVE BIOGRAPHY OF THE RUSSIAN ENLIGHTENER YA. V. ABRAMOV

Abstract

The paper discusses the role of the ideologist of cultural movement in the reformist populism of the 1880s - 1890s, enlightener and writer Ya. V. Abramov in the context of creation of the book series "Life of remarkable people. Biographical library of F. Pavlenkov.. Its educational concept and democratic character are largely determined by Abramov's social and worldview intentions - ideological inspirer of so-called "going to the people", "going to great cultural work", who saw the goals of such work in releasing "constrained forces and abilities of the Russian folk spirit", supporting the "mental activity of the Russian people", in promoting its "generation of new forms of life". The author suggests a hypothesis, according to which the ideological genesis of the series is contained in Abramov's short story "The Philistine Thinker" (1881), where the idea on the educational significance of the biographies of prominent people, "benefactors of mankind" was first expressed. The paper traces affinity between updating the genre of popular scientific biographies of "great people" and the educational tasks of Abramov and Pavlenkov and highlights the role of "instructive biographies" of Abramov in creating the genre type of documentary and fiction books that synthesize the qualities of "contextual biography" and "biography of the hermeneutic model". The classic exemplarity of Abramov's books is determined by the genre-conditioning and structure-forming function of the concept of personality; a synthesis of artistry and journalism, documentary and imagery; principles of artistic typing when working with documentary material; actualization of genre dominants (biography-life description, biography-research, biography-portrait, etc.); the poetics of narrative, objectivizing the aesthetic nature of author's subjectivity