In Search of Nature and Consciousness in Andrei Bialobotskii’s Pentateugum: Classical Echoes and Modern Impulses

Abstract

Through close reading and reference to the philosophies of the time, this paper demonstrates how the long poem Pentateugum (1690s) by Andrei Bialobotskii (ca. 1640-1720) offers us a dynamic picture of the tensions —between Classical and Orthodox cultures and between religious and secularized literatures—leading to the East Slavic Enlightenment. According to Andrei Bialobotskii, culture is vain because such is human knowledge. Simultaneously, culture triumphs because, through it, the subject acquires and expresses their consciousness in a summa that comprises the whole history of humankind. In this context, Classical culture provides a model for writing techniques and functions as the highest instance of punished vanity, while expressing the harmony between nature and the individual.