Death as a Semiotic Issue: Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220306.031How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Polyphony; Cultural code; Dostoevsky; Tolstoy; Culture; Civilization; Paganism

Abstract

The cultural code of dying is fundamental to every culture. The transition from paganism to Christianity was marked by a new thanatological teaching, expressed in the exclamation: «Christ is Risen!» It formed the basis of Russian traditional thanatology and the Russian cultural code. It is preserved in the life experience of many of Dostoevsky’s heroes, whom we will call conditionally as representatives of spiritual culture, it sounds in the story of Prince Myshkin about a person sentenced to death. Representatives of civilization and paganism are destroying the Russian cultural code. Different voices in the artistic world of Dostoevsky form a polyphonic cosmos, not chaos, because they are structured according to the anthropological teaching of the Church. Tolstoy became a truly revolutionary in the field of thanatology, he seeks to create his own religion and his own doctrine of death, based on belief in the immortality of the soul and disbelief in the immortality of the individual.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Svetlana Gerasimova
AU  - Elena Kulikova
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/03/30
TI  - Death as a Semiotic Issue: Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky
BT  - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 194
EP  - 199
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220306.031
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220306.031
ID  - Gerasimova2022
ER  -