HISTORICAL ANTHROPOSOPHY OF A. K. TOLSTOY AS PLAYWRIGHT: ROMANTIC MYTHOLOGIZATION OR EPISTEMOLOGICAL MYSTIFICATION?
The article attempts to study historical anthroposophy in the drama of A.K. Tolstoy, one of the components of which was the paradigm of "place", "position", "destination", "path" of a historical personality in the historical process. It is shown that the desire to solve many problems of historical, political and spiritual life of the nation led in the late nineteenth century to the formation of counterfactual models of historical events - alternative interpretations of a well-known fact. It is proved that the historical consciousness of A.K. Tolstoy evolving under the sign of eschatology and theurgy, reflecting the notions of the historical process as alternating shocks and changes, generated the need to "re-create" history. The embodiment of this need attracted the playwright to the field of mythmaking. Tolstoy's alternative concept of man in the world and history is embodied in the dramatic trilogy, and its invariant - the idea of "debt", "service", "destiny" in their ontological and metaphysical sense is considered in the article on the example of the first tragedy, "The Death of Ivan the Terrible". The question is whether it is the influence of the romantic traditions that shaped the writer’s idealistic understanding of the nature and objectives of art or appreciation of art as a form of alien existence, which can become a means of metaphysical knowledge of the world that determines the specific nature of the mysticism of the playwright. The conclusions are formulated that A.K. Tolstoy’s mysterial and theurgical aims were extremely difficult: he had to reconcile Christian historicism, esoteric gnosis, historiosophic and philosophic doctrine and national mythopoetic archetypes relevant for its time and basing on them to prove the creative possibilities of dramatic text. The tragedy demonstrates the duality of the action, empirical and metaphysical, and the corresponding dual picture of the world, material and transcendental, provides the author with opportunities that are inaccessible to the traditional realistic drama. "Spiritual key" is a semantic sign to the understanding of history and man in it. It forms a symbolic hierarchy, in the process of whose development the historical phenomenon is elevated to the sphere of spiritual-allegorical, divine, and reveals the originality of Tolstoy's anthroposophy and the philosophy of history.