Pierre Abelard in the Interpretation of George Fedotov

Abstract

The author of the article focuses on the insufficiently studied book of G. Fedotov “Abelard”. Structurally, it consists of three parts: “Fate”, “Man”, “The Thinker”, in the names of which Fedotov used three fundamental universals, the essence of which Abelard himself pondered over his whole life. The medieval scientist, as Fedotov revealed, defined universals as a special form of cognition of reality (based on the combination of similar signs of things or general concepts) that exists in the human mind. It is cultural universals that correlate with the fundamental relations of man and the world, with the experience of his understanding of the “external” and “internal” content, with attempts to determine the forces that control the world order in general and human behavior in particular. The Russian medievalist was attracted by the extraordinary personality of the French author, and in the structure of the personality, there was such a cultural-psychological phenomenon as self-awareness. In the study of self-awareness, Abelard Fedotov focuses primarily on the concept of love. At the same time, he considers both the dominant processes of medieval spiritual and cultural history, and the diverse individual properties of a particular individual. Through painstaking study of the processes of self-understanding of the medieval personality, he seeks to determine its positive and negative traits, to give her a moral assessment. Along with the analyticity of the scientist, Fedotov possesses a developed intuition of the writer, which allows him to identify both the features of the psyche of his protagonist and the stylistic sophistication of his narration.