The Flight of a Man in the Work of Efim Chestnyakov as an Ethnocultural Project: Technical and Moral Foundations

Abstract

Representative of the Silver Age Efim Chestnyakov approached writing and illustrating literary works from the standpoint of an artist and a school teacher. He was also doing painting, clay modeling, hand-made puppet theatre with the participation of children and photography. The topic of creating an aircraft runs through his many-sided work. The relevance of the problem under study shows that Chestnyakov composed entire works and individual stories about the «flying man». For the first time, the question is raised about the influence of various publications of the early XXth century on the literary work of the writer. Methods of historical and philological research and «real commenting» are applied to the material of Chestnyakov’s literary works, based on a comparison of the author's plots and images with folklore works and data on technical innovations of his time. The results of the study and their discussion show that Chestnyakov deeply studied the innovative achievements of his time and reflected them in a creatively transformed form in a well-structured own system of different types and genres of art. Also he was worried about the moral aspects of aircraft construction and the issues of the influence of human flights over long distances on the established life of a traditional society for centuries. Conclusions are made that the first manned flights on the designed aircraft and the means of their detection attracted the attention of Chestnyakov and were widely reflected in his work.