The dispute about man in V. Korotkevich’s novel Christ has landed in Grodno

Abstract

The central problem of V. Korotkevich’s novel Christ Has Landed in Grodno (1966) is the dispute about man. The interpretation of the motif of Christ’s second coming is introduced there. The concept of personality in the artistic world of the novel is deciphered with the help of various codes: Biblical, cultural and historical, folkloristic, etc. The system of events is constructed as the clash of two mutually exclusive points of view on the value of personality: medieval, according to which a man in his earthly life is paltry and does not deserve respect and happiness, and humanistic, the main postulate of which is „man is the crown of the universe”. V. Korotkevich builds a neomythological picture of the world where various layers of time, including the 20th century, are unified. While considering the man’s right to dignity and freedom, Korotkevich creates a historical novel which is, in fact, sharply polemical in relation to its contemporary reality.