The influence of the ethical ideas of L.N. Tolstoy and P.A. Kropotkin on G. Gazdanov’s creative principles

The relevance of the study is due to the need to study the ethical foundations of the writer’s artistic world. The correlation of G. Gazdanov’s works and his journalism with the concept of art by L.N. Tolstoy and the original ethics of P.A. Kropotkin is revealed. G. Gazdanov’s work is illuminated in an axiological manner, in connection with which art is positioned as a sphere of social life, which is the evolution of the spiritual development of mankind as a part of nature, conceivable in the projection of the divine principle. The task of the artist determines the motivation of reader to moral self-improvement. For this, the most important is the life experience of the author, which is opposed to “literary artificiality” and technicalism. The artist’s action is integrated into society as a specific type of activity that combines the uniqueness of personal self-expression, cultural patterns and the evolutionary element of a new word in the form of a high message to the world. The typological connection between the writer’s metapoetics and pretexts is revealed implicitly in the texts of his works (“An Evening with Claire”, “Flight”, “The Prisoner”, etc.) and explicitly in his journalism. As a result of the analysis, it was possible to trace that in the eidological field of G. Gazdanov, the Apolonic and Dionysian principles, the “infectious” soulfulness of L.N. Tolstoy and the spiritual searches of F.M. Dostoevsky are combined. Following the symbolist concept of “total unity”, G. Gazdanov “collects stones” and, focusing on his predecessors, removes the opposition between “elite” art and “literature for the masses”. The tendency from lyricism to plot in meta narration appears to be a reasonable choice aimed at the “echo” of the reader and a responsible civic position.