POLEMIC AROUND A. I. HERZEN IN THE CULTURAL LIFE OF THE 1860-S (BASED ON RUSSIAN JOURNALISM)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the turning point in the perception of late activity of A.I. Herzen by Russian society. The authors note that the sixties of the XIX century are naturally considered the time of decisive changes in the life of Russian society, and in Russian culture their sign was the progressive separation of literary forces according to the ideological principle. The article considers the acute controversy that happened in the cultural life of the 1860s between the London publicist, publications of M. N. Katkov (“Modern Chronicle”, “Russian Herald”) and the newspaper of P. S. Usov “Severnaya pchela." An ideological-free analysis of key articles written during the controversy (“Letter to Katkov and Leontiev”, “Young and Old Russia”, “Journalists and Terrorists” by A. I. Herzen, “Our Foreign réfugiés”, “Note for the publisher of “Kolokol” M. N. Katkov, the forerunner of “Severnaya pchela”, which today are convincingly attributed as belonging to N. S. Leskov), allows you to identify important differences in the socio-cultural positions of representatives of the “conservative” bodies of the domestic press and draw conclusions about copyright strategies for creating journalistic statements. The article draws conclusions about the influence of this controversy on the social and literary fate of writers, it is noted that the controversy with Katkov anticipated a sharp cooling to Herzen of Russian society in the following 1863, when, after the publisher of “Kolokol” supported the Polish uprising, the newspaper's circulation fell sharply to 500 copies, equally significant was the controversy of 1862 for Leskov, whose only beginning literary path almost came to an end as a result of harassment by the “progressive” press, and in the mind of the writer, the name Herzen began to be forever associated with the St. Petersburg fires, the imposing frivolity of revolutionary agitators and the sacrificed lives of young fanatics, which was reflected not only in the subsequent “Herzen” essays of Leskov, but also in his artistic prose. In this regard observations on Leskov's articles are especially relevant, the originality of the early journalism of which still remains a little-studied phenomenon of Russian culture.