Critique of the new hero in cinema (L. Visconti) and literature (F. M. Dostoevsky)

Abstract

The article examines the philosophical basis of the figure of a new hero in literature and film. “New heroes” in selected literary and cinema works are compared within the context of existentialist philosophy and “philosophical anthropology”. Material for the comparative intertextual and intermedial analysis is the novel Demons by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and Luchino Visconti’s late films The Damned, Ludwig and Conversation Piece. The article attempts to broaden the intertextual horizon of research on Visconti by drawing new parallels between his films and Dostoevsky’s work. The work argues that the Italian filmmaker, following the Russian writer of the 19th century and the European philosophers of the 20th century, criticises the “hero” who destroyed the old order on purpose to create a new one. Visconti’s revolutionary hero suffers from “the pathology of freedom” and refers to the figure of a nihilist from Dostoevsky’s novels, on the one hand, and to the figure of a sovereign in the philosophical and anthropological works of German and French writers of the 1930–50s, on the other. In his films The Damned, Ludwig and Conversation Piece, Visconti adopts not only a number of motifs from Dostoevsky but also replicates the main idea of the Russian writer who supposed that the enhancement of the human race was possible only after the second coming of Christ.