Epoch / Period vs Generation in the Literary and Critical Consciousness of the 19th Century

This article analyses the functioning of the concepts of “epoch”, “period”, and “generation” in nineteenth-century literature, criticism, and literature studies. The concept of “epoch” presupposes a linear stage understanding and interpretation of history, and “period” can also be used within other concepts of historical development. The “epoch”, sometimes replaced by the “century”, and the “period” were traditionally used as measurement units of literature and culture history (cf. works of A. Bestuzhev, I. Kireevsky, V. Belinsky, etc.). One of the first periodisations of the history of Russian literature which employed these concepts was given by I. M. Born. The concept of “generation” in its meaning contains a biological, natural connotation, and therefore is not necessarily associated with the linear stage understanding of historical time. As S. N. Zenkin puts it, “a generation is time embodied in people, in their dramatic destiny”. The concept of “generation” is often used in periods of historical time which require a person to comprehend themselves and their place in history. A good example is Romanticism in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Another factor that actualises generational problems is the influence of biological and naturalistic ideas when a community motif of people doomed to be born and live with this influence “in their blood” emerges in this quite unfavorable time. This situation is considered by the author of this paper regarding the functioning of the “generation” concept in A. P. Chekhov’s works, who actively marked himself as belonging to the eighties’ “artel” (generation) in the 1880s. This concept as a subject of his characters’ argument subsequently recurs in Chekhov’s works of fiction. All the concepts mentioned are also analysed in the History of the Russian Literature of the 19th Century (1908–1911, ed. D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky), which summed up the achievements of the nineteenth-century cultural and historical school. The author emphasises how this book (History...) develops a method of working with these concepts, and this method later comes in demand with the twentieth-century humanities.