The moral maturation plot in the short stories of the A. Shteiger

The article presents the results of a study of the moral maturation plot in the short stories of the poet Anatoly Shteiger “Bricks” (1933) and “The Jew” (1934). Shteiger is one of the main representatives of the “Paris note”, the leading young émigré literary movement that promoted the aesthetics of the “human document” as optimal for Russian youth who had lost their homeland and were experiencing a spiritual crisis. Shteiger’s stories, on the one hand, are inscribed in the poetic system of this author, which makes them representative of his unique creative worldview, and on the other hand, they exist in the context of short fiction of the influential magazine “Numbers”, which published the works of the “young” and became the place of crystallization of the pessimistic worldview and ego-documentary poetics of the “Paris note”. The central problem of the fiction of “Numbers” is the problem of personal and generational self-determination: the vital and creative super-task of young emigrants consists of integration into the surrounding reality, which, being represented by the space of the modern multinational industrial West, is perceived by them as alien and hostile. In the stories of Shteiger, the condition for the autobiographical and autopsychological hero to find “his place” in the world is the establishment of a spiritual dialogue with the character-Other, in whose image the ideal hypostasis of the author’s alter ego is objectified. Growing up for Shteiger’s heroes means realizing themselves in the outside world, while remaining faithful to universal humanistic values. Interaction with the ideal Other constitutes a test for the hero’s developing morality, which he is unable to withstand due to spiritual weakness, ontologically inherent in all people and at the same time being a property of his nature, revealed in a situation of moral choice. In turn, the ethical ideal (and God as its personification) is depicted by Shteiger as transcendental to the earthly world, and its embodiment in the image of an initially imperfect person is of a transitory or illusory nature. The unattainability of the Absolute, according to Shteiger, is the cause of universal moral relativism and the internal discrepancy between the heroes and their social and cultural status.