On The Spiritual Ecology In Astafayev's Writings

Viktor Petrovich Astafyev(1924-2001),a world-renowned contemporary Russian writer,is reputed as “Tolstoy of the 20 th century”.He is an outstanding representative of the “New Soil School”,a leading figure in “Rural prose” and “moral-philosophical novels”,at the same time a winner of major awards such as the “Literary Prize of the Russian Federation” etc.His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages and widely spread around the world.The great impact of Astafayev's creation stems from the worldwide factors in his writings his concern for the fate of mankind at the end of the 20 th century,and his meditation on a series of global issues such as the relationship between man and nature,ecological harmony,moral humanity and so on.At present,the domestic and foreign researches on Astafayev's writings mainly focus on the aspects of ideological content,artistic style,and ecological ethics and so on.However,they haven't paid enough attention to spiritual ecological problems,which is the most prominent aspect in his writing.Based on the theory of “spiritual ecology”,with cultural criticism as the main research method,the present dissertation probes into all aspects of the spiritual ecological concerns in his writings.The dissertation is composed of seven parts.The introduction introduces the status and the influence of Astafayev's writings on the history of literature.It reviews the research status of Astafayev at home and abroad,clarifies the concept of “spiritual ecology”,and points out the value and significance of spiritual ecological researches on Astafayev.Chapter One deals with the basic contents of Astafiev's Spiritual Ecological thoughts and the social and cultural background leading to the thoughts.The author of the present dissertation holds that the socio historical context of the 20 th century,together with the spiritual and cultural traditions of Russian Literature gives birth to Astafiev's eschatology-based spiritual ecological thoughts.Section One mainly probed into Russian social situation in 20 th century.The constant political movement in the early 20 th century,the great clean-up in the 1930 s and the elimination of the rich-peasant movement during the process of agricultural collectivization constitutes an unprecedented spiritual catastrophe.War and totalitarianism have caused tremendous damage to the spiritual dimension of mankind.The second section deals with the spiritual and cultural traditions of Russian Literature.Russia's Christian culture-dominated cultural forms constrain the formation of forms of literary value,making humanitarian tradition and the affirmation to spiritual personality two important aspects of the spiritual and cultural tradition of Russian Literature.Section Three summarizes Astafiev's spiritual ecological thoughts.End-of-world sense of human existence,root-seeking consciousness and religious redemption constitute three dimensions of Astafiev's spiritual ecological thoughts.Chapter Two centers on the deterioration of natural ecology and the spiritual crisis of human beings.The deconstruction of the native land order is the core symptom of deterioration of natural ecology and the emergence of spiritual crisis.Hometown,villagers acting as guardians of native land rural spiritual order,the villagers' united and harmonious mode of living together,as well as their traditional beliefs,are the four main constituent elements of the local land order.Section One focuses on the influence of the destruction of harmonious relationship between Man and Nature on native land culture.The Russian-style logic of modernity,whose main feature is the realization of the theory of “Man and God”,has become the basis of building the relationship between man and nature.This logic makes the nature on which man lives become an external entity for mankind to conquer and control,which undermines the natural origin of Siberia,and leads to the loss of the hometown and the disappearance of the convergent traditional living mode,and shakes the culture roots of native land culture.Section Two concerns with the influence of homeland spiritual order guardians' fading away and the deconstructionists' invasion on native land spirit.The self-suicide of the nature's daughter,who represents the natural beauty of human nature in the native land spiritual order,and the passing away of Russian's traditional guardian of spiritual culture both symbolize the end of an era and demonstrate the fracture of the foundation of traditional culture.The “invaders”,with a characteristic of advocating individualism and centering on egoism,break the spiritual order of native land culture and fundamentally lead to the deconstruction of this order.Section Three focuses on extinction of humanity and crisis of belief,resorting to the mythological elements in the sacrifice of the “Son of God” and the parable of the “Fish King”.The third chapter focuses on the deterioration of social ecology and crisis of human spiritual ecology.The deterioration of social ecology is mainly manifested in the alienation between man and man,which is particularly prominent in family,youth groups as well as the bullied and humiliated female images.Section One deals with the spiritual crisis of the youth groups.On the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union,young people moved from a belief crisis to belief vacuum and the blind coup after the rupture of the national culture became the spiritual universals of the young generation.Section Two deals with the degeneration of contemporary families.The incompleteness of families and the alienation of family members have become the explicit features of the depravation of social ecology.Among them,the alienation of kinship has shaken the divine and natural foundation of life.Section Three deals with the “Bullied and Insulted” woman images dissolution of saint spirit.On the eve of the disintegration of the Soviet Union,the boundary between "normal life" and "ugly life" was dismantled.The female with the tradition of sacredness and the image of "being bullied and insulted" was both the masochist and the spiritual perpetrator of others.The absence of the self-sacrifice spirit and the salvation function symbolizes the dissolution of their saints' spirits.Chapter Four is devoted to war and man's Spiritual Crisis.The writer examines the Great Patriotic War as the tragedy of all mankind by transcending the viewpoints of history and national culture.In digging deeply into the tragedy consciousness and tragedy spirit contained in the war,he completes a more profound leap over the concept of war than his contemporaries.Section One focuses on the writer's different ways of describing wars.Different from the traditional writings of the Soviet literature on the Great Patriotic War,Astafiev focuses on the spiritual trauma caused by the War and on the integrity of human beings to defuse heroism,so as to intensify its destructiveness and lethality by the bipolar dialogue of harsh naturalism and distinct sentiment.Section Two probes into the individual regression in war.Individual aphasia under collectivism violence,the value of the individual life being completely denied,and the deconstruction of human “subjectivity” in the war,the value of individual existence being ignored or even emasculated,all undermine the moral ultimate source of human beings.Section Three discloses the metaphor of the war as the end of the world.Astafiev not only introduces the naturalistic description of battles to a level of mysticism,but also draws on the narrative model of the most classic religious motifs in the Bible,which highlight the evil aspects of the end of the world and take the end-state of human existence as a metaphorical state.In the fifth chapter,the reconstruction of the integrated spiritual ecology is discussed.The reconstruction of ideal spiritual ecology relies on the building of individual personality and the principle of polymerization in Orthodox people's studies.Section One focuses on the construction of perfect spiritual personality in secular sense,which is indicated by the movement from alienation to reconciliation.The protagonists either restore to contact with their loved ones or the surrounding world through the establishment of a sense of basic morality or retrieve their own individual identifies through the identification with their national character.Section Two is on the construction of perfect spiritual personality in religious sense,which is mainly indicated by the individual's spiritual pilgrimage.The protagonists either walk out of history with “Holy Fool” spirit and complete their spiritual pilgrimage in an extreme environment with selfless love,or find the once lost divinity in the deconstruction of the Meta history and return to God.Section Three analyzes polygamy living as ideal spiritual ecology model.The writer prefers the polygamy survival based on the construction of the ideal spiritual personality,which is further based on the establishment of the polygamy unity.This converging unity needs three intrinsic attributes: freedom,organic character,grace and love.The utopia constructed in The Fish King is the ideal form of such unity.Based on the above analysis,the following conclusions have been drawn: Viktor Petrovich Astafyev takes the Orthodox humanist thought and the principle of polymerization as the basis for the construction of ideal spiritual personality,at the same time,takes the polymerized survival based on the perfect spiritual personality as the ideal spiritual ecological model,which highlight his spiritual ecological thoughts and lay the foundation of his uniqueness in the history of Russian ideology.In addition,his creations have distinctive features of Siberia.In his focuses on the spiritual collectivism,he has realized the perfect fusion of Siberia culture and Russian culture.