Rewriting the "New People" Plot in the Russian Fiction at the End of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Centuries

The article has two major tasks. The first one is to continue with the analysis of the issue of "rewriting classics" in the literature of the Silver Age, which the author initiated more than a decade and a half ago and which has been investigated mainly on the material of plots by F. Dostoyevsky. The second task is to analyze the transformations of the ideological and behavioral pattern "new people" (nihilists) in a new literary epoch. The novelty of settling this issue lies in expanding the historical and literary material, as well as including the analysis of "new people" plots in the literature of the Silver Age (novellas and short stories by V. V. Veresayev and Z. N. Gippius). The methods of research are based on the description of the so-called "transitional" periods in the works by N. I. Konrad,and one of the significant features of those radical times is the reflexivity within a literary text. Here the author deals with the literature being self-focused, and its "meta" character as one of the most important features of the culture at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The artcile considers in detail the plot schemas in the texts about "new people" in the Silver Age fiction: the cult of momentaneous love and beauty (the maximal spiritual unity of lovers together with denial of physical passions), rejecting the conventions of life in preaching love for oneself. We can imagine in these thematic blocks not only the conceive of a new world-view associated with the philosophy of decadency, but also the nascence of a nihilsm which denies the nihilism of the 19th century, and is more likely to incline to a Nietzschian type of rejecting the traditional morale, which could have been called "neo-nihilism". The motifs of this new nihilism rejecting the old one which has become the fathers'traditions, and the substitution of the social revolutionariness by the moral one, were further developed in the nivels by Gippius in the 1910s ("The Demon Doll" and "Roman-Tzarevich"), however, it is important to include into the sources not only works by Chernyshevsky and Turgenev, but also by Dostoevsky, especially his novels "Crime and Punishment" and "Demons".