ANÁLISIS DE LOS ITEMS DE CADA ÁREA SEXUAL Y TIPO DE PERSONALIDAD

In Grin’s literary world life often does not follow the individual’s logical assumptions. The protagonists in his stories cannot take anything for granted, in a hostile world they cannot count on the support of kindred spirits either and thus their experiences are rich in interesting consequences.

One of the stories in which we may find a moving vision of the human quest for the meaning of existence is ‘Rai’ where Grin depicts decadent members of the intelligentsia. This whole work is, according to Litwinow, entirely ‘filled with an atmosphere of destruction, alogism and absurdity’ (Litwinow 1986:86). The plot conveys a sombre and depressing depiction of the lives of five very different people. Grin provides in ‘Rai’ five different descriptions, each revealing a more or less earth-shattering collapse of values. The leading force and most lurid individual of the group is a banker who has been corrupted by wealth and power. The other characters are: a book-keeper (grieving over the death of his beloved), a captain (devoid of any hope of love), a journalist (perpetually consumed by hatred for people) and a woman (inwardly burnt out by ennui). Although they all appear to die of their own free will after drinking poisoned wine, they have in fact been inwardly dead long before they committed this theatrical deed. Grin deliberately chooses random individuals to show that no matter what status, wealth or characters people possess, they all die from the effect of recognising ‘the great mistake called life’, to paraphrase Schopenhauer’s famous quotation. The sufferings and misery have become so unbearable to the five characters that suicide appears to them the only possible option, a form of liberation.

Also in other Grin stories we find what Dostoevsky, according to Jackson (1958:27), foresaw in Notes from Underground: ‘uncontrolled egotism, destructive individualism, demand for independent will’. They become tangible facts in the lives of many of Grin’s characters.

This is what we find, for instance, in ‘Gorbun’, where the main character is spiritually crippled and filled with overwhelming resentment.16 His everyday life is a constant battle with the dark side of existence. Grin’s hero witnesses everything that was so dramatically described by Schopenhauer – life’s arena where innumerable representatives

16 _{He may be compared to the hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground who, though isolated from}

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of the principium individuationis (which Schopenhauer describes as the most essential rule of the self-preservation of all living cells and the preservation of species) participate in ‘a war of all against all’.17 The governing features of this continuous struggle are envy, cruelty, stupidity, animal instinct, hunger, collapse of dreams and loss of faith.

Grin heroes discover painfully that, to use Graham’s words, ‘there is no explanation for our life – the world; it is a pure fact and what follows is our choice – free and crucial’ (Graham 1990:76). We find such a deeply disturbing conclusion about life in numerous Grin stories, generating a feeling of the absurdity of human existence which brings our discussion to the main theme of existential philosophy.

The notion of absurdity, as described by Camus (1995), constitutes the dramatic opposition and conflict between two ideals – man naturally seeks for harmony, order and logical answers while the world he is thrown into displays striking chaos and apparent injustice and forces him to accept illogical and unjust conditions: ‘the divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity’ (Camus 1955:5).18

Furthermore, many other feelings – the futility of life, the senselessness of our aspirations and daily routine – add to the prevailing sense of lack of logical continuity and harmony. The absurd lies, therefore, not within the world itself, nor in man, but only in their coexistence.19 As a natural consequence (or in the natural process of intellectual development) man’s individual experiences are transferred to an abstract level of generalisation: human life is perceived clearly as beyond man’s control and all attempts to make life organised and well thought-out turn out to be doomed to failure.

It is exactly this understanding of the human condition and the world where ‘we are confronted with the irrevocable and tragic contradiction between intent and effect’ (Van Stralen 2005:8) that we find in Grin’s oeuvre. In some of the author’s gloomy stories (such as ‘Vor v lesu’, ‘Malinnik Iakobsona’ and ‘Kirpich i muzyka’) we may even say it is the key element of the plots. What we find in Grin’s oeuvre and what allows us to draw certain

17 _{The term introduced by Schopenhauer and later discussed by Nietzsche, in English philosophical tradition}

translated as ‘the principle of individuation’.

18 _{It should be noted that, although it is Camus who is seen by many philosophers as the father of the}

European existential concept of absurdity, the concept itself was invented and discussed in the first half of the nineteenth century by another philosopher, the proto-existentialist Kierkegaard. Critical of Hegel's philosophical objectivism, the Danish thinker tried to analyse man’s existence in an abstract and impersonal way. One of his main aims was to reveal the very essence of ‘existing as a human being’ – the absurd. For Kierkegaard, who was a devout Christian, in the cruel and obscure world the absurd is so deeply-rooted in human existence that it penetrates even religious faith. The famous leap of faith accredited to Kierkegaard advances the view that a man is utterly devoid of any visible signs that might lead him to be sure about any values in the world. For detailed accounts of the problem of absurdity in existential philosophy, see, for instance, Mordarski (2009), Hughes (2007), Raymond (1991) and Hochberg (1965).

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parallels between him and existential thinkers is that the search for the meaning of life has to be limited to one’s inner world of values which often proves difficult.