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Abstract

In the article it is offered to use the term «completeness of existence» in relation to the ideological contents of the poem by A. S. Pushkin «A wondrous moment I remember…» and also to apply it to the description of that romantic discourse which had been developed by Pushkin by 1825 and which succeeded an educational «discourse of happiness». It seems that the poet’s evolution of ethical, religious and philosophical ideas – from hedonism and voluntarism to the ideas of «service» to the Absolute and the adoption of imperfection of historical reality – can be transposed to the entire early Russian romanticism, which was expressed, and in fact created, by Pushkin. Being at the same time and a completer of the traditions of literature of the 18th century, he showed the exhaustion of «happiness paradigm» by his own creative biography – hedonism and eudemonism as vital and creative goals of the personality. Something dialectically opposite had to succeed them – both the contents denying them, and incorporated them. It is appropriate to designate this phenomenon as «completeness of existence» – an ecstatic state in which «happiness» and «bliss» are only its compound parts, equal to inspiration, love, completeness of feelings, beauty, harmony with the world, to unity with Infinite. It should be noted that «happiness discourse» did not disappear from culture and literature, at least for that simple reason that to present terrestrial happiness in its concrete manifestations (success, the prosperity, family, power) and to embody them is much easier, than to reach the completeness of existence demanding tension of all spiritual powers, infinite perfectibility and belief in Absolute existence.

Key words

A. S. Pushkin, religious and philosophical lyrics, completeness of existence, happiness, eudemonism, romanticism, Enlightenment, history of the ideas.