The Appearance of the Hero. From the History of Russian Emotional Culture in the Late 18th - Early 19th Century

The book is dedicated to the history of Russian emotional culture of the late 18th - early 19th century: a time of competition between the court, Masonic lodges, and literature for the monopoly on "symbolic images of feelings" that an educated and Europeanized Russian person was expected to reproduce in their inner life. The focus of the research is the history of love and death of Andrei Ivanovich Turgenev, the author of a confessional diary, a gifted poet, a kind of "pilot sample" of a person of the Romantic era who could not bring his life and his personality into line with the models on which he was raised. A detailed reconstruction of this mysterious story is based on the understanding of the mechanisms of cultural conditioning of individual experience and the methods of analyzing the emotional experience of a single individual as proposed in the book. A.L. Zorin is a professor at the University of Oxford and the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences.