The motif of alienation in Arthur Adamov’s confessional prose (“The Confession”)

This study enquires into one of the modernist culture key motifs – the alienation motif actualised in the autobiographical prose of the French writer Arthur Adamov. It reveals the problem of the motif genesis in Adamov’s artistic reference system through its connection with texts of French (surrealism) and Russian (Nikolai Gogol) literature, philosophy (Alexandre Kojève, G.W.F. Hegel) and psychoanalysis (Melanie Klein). The author and the hero of “The Confession” feels alienated both in relation to the body or its parts, and in relation to his own actions (the playing, the prayer). As a phantasm of his ideal, the idea of self-transcendence is transmitted, when the “I” is not alienated, but dissolves in the religious experience of merging with the transcendent, thanks to this, in particular, overcoming internal splitting. The emphatic realisation of the alienation motif becomes the triad “body – spirit – man” explicated in “The Confession”, testifying to the loss by modern people of the ability to experience genuine achieving the union with the divine and to Adamov’s longing for archaic culture. Directly appealing to psychopathological issues, manifestly describing his own neuroses, Adamov uses this material as anthropological and existential, rather than clinical, relying on the psychoanalytic concept of neurosis as a general sharpening that characterises life outside the therapist’s office. However, artistic creativу work can also be interpreted as a general sharpening of human experience – and in this case, Adamov’s text can be read as a description of the neurosis of epoch or the neurosis of culture.