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This study was carried out at IWL RAS with a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 22-18-00051), https://rscf.ru/project/22-18-00051/

Abstract:

The article examines the “estate myth” in Mikhail Prishvin’s diaries of 1941–1945, in the book “You and I. Diary of Love” (1939–1940), written together with V.D. Prishvina, as well as in Valeria Prishvina’s memoirs “Our House” (1977). During the Second World War, the “estate myth” becomes part of Prishvin’s autobiographical myth, which is based on the motif of restoring the lost home, the parental estate of Khrushchevo-Levshino in Orel province. The search for home forms the creative attitude of the Prishvin family, where home is not a refuge, but a topos of salvation salvation for all that perishes, revelation of the joy of a transformed life. The space of the house during the war contains features of “heterotopia”. The image of a “home of happiness”, remote in the wilderness and at the same time included in common life, addressed to the suffering of his contemporaries, turns into the theme of the “universal home” as the creation of the world during the war already in the memoirs of V.D. Prishvina “Our House”. The article proves that the estate and dacha life of the Prishvins is not an immersion in nostalgia for the lost past, a kind of escapism in a catastrophic time of war, but conscious life practice, the so-called “estate habitus”, which mobilizes a person in a crisis period of history, awakening “kinship attention” and compassion for the Other, unites people into an “invisible community”, overcoming the spontaneous, destructive forces of war inside and outside the person.