The Emergence of a Hero is dedicated to the history of Russian emotional culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the epoch when the court Masonic lodges and literature were competing for the monopoly on the 'symbolic images of feeling' that an educated and Europeanised Russian was supposed to interiorize and reproduce. The case study in the centre of the study is the story of the life and death of Andrei Turgenev (1781-1803), the author of a confessional diary, a gifted poet, and an early Russian Romantic who failed to live up to the principles and models he cherished. Brought up on the patterns of emotions he found in works of Rousseau, Sterne, and the authors of Sturm and Drang, he soon found them too narrow for his individuality, and navigated towards a more mature nineteenth century Romanticism, but was not able to make this transition. Turgenev experimented not so much in his literary work as in his life. The reconstruction of this convoluted and enigmatic case is based on archival research and innovative analysis of individual emotional experience.
A history of Russian emotional culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as told through the story of the life and death of Andrei Turgenev (1781-1803), the author of a confessional diary, a gifted poet, and an early Russian Romantic who failed to live up to the principles and models he cherished.
The Emergence of a Hero first appeared in Russian in 2016, and remains every bit as fine a work of scholarship in Leo Shtutin's welcome and accomplished translation. In minute detail and with finesse, Andrei Zorin portrays a precocious talent who grasped at the dawn of the Romantic age that a new type of personality was coming into being - a personality prone to melancholy and disillusionment but also idealistic, inclined to self-sacrifice and capable of delighting in love, friendship, philosophy, music and poetry.
