Siberian “Judas Iscariot” as Actors of Social Conflicts

The figure of the biblical Judas remains stable in world culture. Many writers have explanations of the motives for his betrayal. But an artistic study of this phenomenon, carried out outside the historical and geographical context, does not convey the complexity of inadequate human behavior in social conflicts in the zone of contact of cultures. Siberia was such a space in the 18th–19th centuries. The lack of effective control in it provoked the emergence of asocial personalities. Their deviant behavior is partly explained by frontier theory. The article examines the fate of A.D. Menshikov (the first third of the 18th century) and the Zavalishin brothers (the second third of the 19th century) who found themselves in Asian Russia. Their images contained both literary and mythological features and the qualities of marginalized people living in marginal lands.