Eschatological Paradigm in V. F. Odoevsky’s Short Story “The Dead Man’s Mocking”

This article examines “The Dead Man’s Mocking” (1834), one of the inserted stories from V. F. Odoevsky’s novel “Russian Nights” (1844). The ethical and aesthetic aspects of this story are analyzed from the viewpoint of the eschatological paradigm. It demonstrates that thanks to this paradigm, driven by the author’s religious worldview, which permeates all his works and predetermines the author’s special attitude to philosophical and social topics, the ethical and aesthetic aspects also acquire a religious meaning. The absence of love in the heroine, named Lisa by the author and “diametrically” compared with Karamzin’s heroine with the same name, is associated with her loss of religious faith, which emphasizes the impossibility of her resurrection within the framework of the eschatological paradigm. The composition of the “Fourth Night” from “Russian Nights,” to which “The Dead Man’s Mocking” belongs, reflects the spiritual crisis of the story’s fictional author and its overcoming, which leads to a rethinking of the role of romantic irony in the context of the eschatological paradigm. Taking into account the historiosophical and religious context, which develops in the novel through the dialogues of four friends led by Faust, the plot of this parable warns the reader against forgetting the humanistic and religious values inherent in the Russian people from time immemorial, against being carried away by European rationality, self-interest and from adherence to the essential and useful. The apocalyptic flood scene described in the short story serves the same purpose. Thus, attention to the eschatologi- cal paradigm helps to interpret both the poetics of V. F. Odoevsky’s story and its teleology.