‘My confession is the smallest confusion’

Epistolary Confessions of Apollon Grigoriev

Abstract

By the middle of the 19th century confession became the dominant trend in Russian literature. Many writers, regardless of social, political, philosophical, ethical, aesthetic attitudes, turn to confession both in fi ction and in autobiographical work. Apollon Grigoriev also writes poetic confessions and, moreover, calls his literary-critical and epistolary-autobiographical texts “literary confessions”, “confessions”. The article deals with the letter-confession of Grigoriev, addressed to M. P. Pogodin dated August 26 — October 7, 1859. Attention is focused on the “internal” state of the addresser, who seeks to realize the “truths” both about himself and about that external environment (the names of some of Grigoriev’s Florentine interlocutors are confessional topics, in particular, to the issues of the opposition of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, “socialist beliefs”, “Byzantine intricacies” A. S. Khomyakov. The indirect influence of romantic “Schellingism” on Grigoriev’s interpretation of Orthodoxy as a
spontaneous-historical, living, organic principle is noted specified), communication with which, as one might assume, provoked his appeal to