The reflection of the author’s socio-political views in the autopsychological characters of F. D. Kryukov’s “teacher’s cycle”

About the author:

Yulia I. Semina,

Postgraduate student, Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia

yuliyasemina@mail.ru, https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4396-0722

Abstract:

The article attempts to consider F. D. Kryukov’s “teacher’s cycle” as a single meta-text. The autobiographical stories combined by the meta-plot are considered as a reflection of the “writer’s worldview”. While working on the “teacher’s cycle”, Kryukov took an active civic position, being a liberal-minded public and political figure. He was elected to the First State Duma, and was a member of the committee of the Labor People’s Socialist Party. Kryukov’s autopsychological characters were an expression of the author’s view of the education system and the state of Russian society as a whole. A consistent analysis of the works of the “teacher’s cycle” helps to trace how the hopes of the liberal ideologist Kryukov for the “new forces” that developed in pre-revolutionary Russia are crumbling with the realization of the purely destructive nature of the ongoing processes. In the final work of the cycle, the writer with prophetic insight captures the factor of the fatal lack of any solid value orientations among the Russian progressives who embarked on the path of harmonization of society. Nihilism, based on the desecration of centuries-old principles, is interpreted by the writer as the main cause of the revolutionary catastrophe that soon broke out.

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