Aristotle’s Category of Mistake in Russian Criticism of the First Half of the 19th Century

The category of mistake (ἁμαρτία) is one of the most significant categories in Aristotle’s “Poetics.” The Greek philosopher turned to the category of mistake when characterizing a tragic hero, myth, the tragic and the comic, when discussing criticism and ways to respond to it. In Aristotle’s interpretation, a mistake is the result of deliberate actions, but not vicious in their intent. In the Christian era, the lexemes of the ἁμαρτία group were assigned the meaning of moral guilt. As a result, Aristotle’s mistake began to be interpreted as tragic guilt. Later, European literary criticism refused to use the category of mistake. It offered a dual understanding of the cause of the tragic hero’s suffering: either as tragic guilt, or as a result of external influence, i.e., the intervention of fate. The interpretation of the category of mistake in Russian critical thought of the first half of the 19th century was complex and contradictory. In the translation of chapter 25 of Poetics, A. G. Glagolev preserved the unity of Aristotle’s terminology and accurately conveyed the content of the category of mistake. However, he did not turn to arguments about the tragic and comic, which presented the greatest difficulties for European theorists. Unlike contemporary theorists of German Romanticism, N. F. Ostolopov saw the cause of the tragic hero’s suffering in his mistake, rather than in the influence of fate. However, he considered error a vicious action, which contradicted Aristotle’s idea. N. I. Grech, N. F. Merzlyakov, A. I. Galich and V. G. Belinsky did not use the category of mistake. Following the German romantics, they understood the cause of the tragic hero’s suffering as the result of an innocent man’s collision with fate. S. P. Shevyrev was the first in Russian critical thought to turn to the category of mistake. Having accurately conveyed the concept of Aristotle, he wrote about mistake in the context of reasoning about comedy rather than comedy. In his translation of Poetics, under the influence of Lessing’s concept, B. I. Ordynsky perceived the category of mistake in a moralistic sense. As a result, he could not preserve the unity of Aristotle’s categorical apparatus and interpreted the tragic hero’s mistake as a sin. Chernyshevsky pointed out that Aristotle’s interpretations of the sources of the tragic in European criticism were inadequate, but he also refused to use the category of mistake. His work paved the way for a return to the rigorous consistency of Aristotle’s categorical apparatus in the subsequent period.