About the author:
Olga V. Nizova, Assistant Teacher, Belarusian State University of Transport, Kirova 34, 246653 Gomel, Belarus.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7387-9181
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Abstract:
The paper attempts to apply the categories and methods of German hermeneutics of the beginning and the middle of the 20th century, such as understanding of life, sympathetic re-living (W. Dilthey), being-in-the-world, being-with (M. Heidegger), dialogue with tradition, hermeneutic experience (H.-G. Gadamer) and others, to analysis of a famous lyrical novel, “The Life of Arseniev” by Ivan Bunin, to the extent of their correspondence to the philosophical content of the book. The autobiographical self-knowledge in the novel is considered in relation to the same experience expressed in Goethe’s “From My Life: Poetry and Truth”; the paper also describes the hermeneutical situation of the creation of an “autobiography of a fictional person”, traces the influence of Hindu culture, Orthodoxy and Catholicism in the hero’s understanding of the world; notes the cyclic character of time; reveals the love and beauty being the ontological characteristics of the world in the novel; shows the expansion of existence in sympathetic reliving of the past as well as the possibility of being-in-the-world as a poetic being; considers the hero’s acquisition of vocation, the choice of lifestyle and environment as well as the self-examination and self-reflection phenomena as the modes of self-knowledge experience; juxtaposes the understanding of life of the Bunin’s to with the Heidegger’s hermeneutics of factuality.