Christianity and the philosophy of Nietzsche in the writings of Elena Guro

Annotation

The article is devoted to the synthesis and transformation of Christianity and the philosophic concepts of Nietzsche in the writings of Elena Guro (The Story of the Poor Knight). The main focus is on the authors’ understanding of suffering and compassion. A conclusion is made that Guro and Nietzsche saw suffering as an impulse for creative activity and demanded delicacy in compassion; they interpreted Christianity as the message of redemption from guilt and punishment with Christ as a spiritual aristocrat who practiced amor fati. Through hermeneutics (H.-G. Gadamer, M. M. Bakhtin), it is hypothesized that Guro may have referred to Shestov’s book The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Philosophy and Preaching. In the second part of The Story Guro plays with the Good and the Preaching notions of Shestov.

Keywords

Elena Guro, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lev Tolstoy, Lev Shestov, hermeneutics, Christianity, Russian literature, modernism, German philosophy.

Literature

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