THE AUTHOR AND THE HERO IN I.S. SHMELEV’S NOVEL “THE NANNY FROM MOSCOW”

Abstract

I.S. Shmelev was not only a writer and a publicist, but also one of the brightest representatives of Russian Orthodox thought, who created a number of works while in exile. The novel “The Nanny from Moscow” is of a particular importance among the literary works by I.S. Shmelev, because it is a kind of mirror reflecting the writer’s beliefs and worldview. “The Nanny from Moscow” is an insufficiently studied work of literature from the Russian diaspora, which is a lacuna in the space of Russian literary criticism. In this article, special attention is paid to the connection between the writer’s views and the images of the characters who convey these views. The artistic originality of the relationship between the author and the hero in the work “The Nanny from Moscow” is considered based on the facts from the biography of I.S. Shmelev himself. Thanks to M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of “The author and the hero in aesthetic activity”, it is possible to establish a more accurate type of the correlation “author-hero: being analyzed.