Education, Entertainment, and a Part of Life: The Reading Circle of A. I. Ertel and the Heroes of His Works

Aim . To study a motive for reading and images, characters, and types of reading heroes in the prose of A. I. Ertel.

Methodology . The article provides an overview of the writer’s artistic heritage in terms of the motive under study and its implementations. The methodology of the work includes holistic and hermeneutic analysis, ontological and axiological approaches. The collection of Ertel’s own library is reflected, and it is told about its fate in the article. It is shown that the writer’s hopes for education of the people and the practical education of the intelligentsia have been associated with the printed word for a long time. In his prose works, Ertel depicts heroes of different morals and beliefs, showing the importance of meaningful and selective reading, the danger of unsystematic reading in a situation of an unstable system of views.

Results . The motive of reading and the image of the book in the writer’s legacy testify to his broad outlook, helping to identify the different stages of the formation and evolution of his talent. Understanding the motive of reading leads to the awareness of autobiographical moments in fiction texts, Ertel’s use of his own experience, that is not always positive, when creating the worlds of his works. The range of literary interests of Ertel’s heroes largely reflects the author’s preferences, warns the reader against mistakes not only in reading, but also in life. In the works of Ertel’s first period of creativity, democratic sentiments prevail; not yet disappointed in the populist movement, the writer actively contrasts the literature of “pure art” and the works of the populists. Later, the idea of educating the people comes to the fore; the autobiographical hero in the novel “Gardeniny”, Nikolai Rakhmanny, reads a lot in order to understand life. In the final period of his work, Ertel himself turns to journalism and translations, somewhat moving away from purely practical activities to abstract reading. However, there is a big difference between the writer himself and his philosophically minded aesthetes: Ertel preferred systematic work on the land and helping the people, while his heroes turned out to be incapable of practical decisions.

Research implications . The theoretical significance of the study relates to the innovative analysis of the works of the second-tier writer A. I. Ertel in Russian philology. The practical significance is determined by the identification of valuable parallels between the characters and the author himself, and the understanding of his attitude to the book and reading.

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