Russian Orthodox Fiction of the 21st Century: Trends in Its Study and Development

Abstract

This article is devoted to Orthodox fiction as a phenomenon of the modern Russian literary process. The author analyses the approaches to its study and identifies the range of the most controversial issues reflected in the literary studies. These include issues of terminological designation, and the development of differential features that allows the clearer definition of the boundaries of this phenomenon. In addition, it seems relevant to create an optimal classification of the tendencies in Orthodox literature, which allows us to consider its various types, united around a common theocentric vector. Moreover, as a result of the research conducted, three trends based on the principles of Christian anthropology have been identified: the doctrine of the bipolarity of human nature, the idea of deification, and the understanding of freedom as a Divine gift. These principles define the specifics of missionary prose, which focus on the free expression of the will of the person attempting to overcome this bipolarity on the way to deification; of parish prose, which reveals the life of the Christian in the bosom of the Church as a sacred organism and social institution; and of monastic prose, which is based on the artistic parameters of these trends, and complements them with an emphasis on the confessional-preaching discourse and the sacred-metaphysical specifics of the monastic chronotope.