Osmanova, K. P. TRANSFORMATION OF THE CROWD IMAGE IN THE CONFESSION BY ARTHUR ADAMOV. Proceedings of Petrozavodsk State University. 2026;48(7):88–94. DOI: 10.15393/uchz.art.2026.1371


Literature of the peoples of the world

TRANSFORMATION OF THE CROWD IMAGE IN THE CONFESSION BY ARTHUR ADAMOV

Osmanova
K. P. 		Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia
Keywords:
Arthur Adamov
“individual – universal” dichotomy
crowd image
Semyon Frank
Adamov’s simulacrum		 Summary: The article focuses on The Confession, an autobiographical book written by a French writer Arthur Adamov and untranslated into Russian. The author attempts to approach The Confession not only as a confessional but also as a philosophical and literary text, which determines the novelty of this research. The article aims to identify the change stages for the crowd image which are unfolding according to the “thesis – antithesis – synthesis” principle. Through the image of the crowd, Adamov conveys his view of individual human existence as a category intertwined with universal existence. Attention is paid to the issues of comparison with the Russian philosophical tradition and the views of S. L. Frank, which are based on the principle of total unity. The conducted analysis leads to the conclusion that the transformation of the crowd image testifies to the early Adamov’s commitment to the idea of returning to the prim- itive world, understood by him as the territory of human unity, which is formed according to the principle of repetition or cyclical reproduction of life forms. Adamov approaches the writing of The Confession with the idea of humanity as a sum of individualities that are taken into account, differ from each other, but are not essentially interconnected. The specificity of reality, connected with World War II and Adamov’s own camp imprisonment, introduces adjustments to this idea. Thesis is replaced by antithesis: individualities are effaced by the human mass, and the mass itself inertially slides into the abyss of meaninglessness. In The Confession, however, Adamov is not satisfied with an absurdist world-view – he records it, but in the end makes an attempt at synthesis based on priority themes, such as the spirit’s refusal to submit to matter, resistance to the commonness, and the primacy of the existence’s vertical dimension. In late 1943, Adamov generates the dichotomy of individuality (“existence particulière”) and universality (“vie universelle”) and articulates the idea of their possible non-contradiction, where they are not in mutually exclusive, but rather complementary relationships.



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