Özet:

Demon, the poem of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814-1841), often who is regarded as rebellious genius of Russian literature, took ten years of the writer’s short twenty-seven-year life to complete. The main theme of the work, at first glance, seems to be based on a fragment of the life of the fallen angel, who was expelled from heaven, based on rebirth with earthly love but that ends in defeat. When the man and the devil’s paths crossover in the original sin, the devil initiates the earthly life of man by making Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Man is expelled from heaven and sent to the "valley of tears" called earth. The paths of the downfall of these two beings, of man, who is the crown of divine creation, and the one who was an archangel before the rebellion, coincides once again with the path of salvation in the work. However, a detailed examination reveals that placing the work in this narrow frame weakens its intellectual, socio-political content. The biblical theme functions here as an external framework which encompasses a philosophically meaningful conflict. Moreover, the work, due to the close identity between the author and protagonist, contains deep traces of Lermontov's individual sense of the world towards the period and the universe that he lived in. In Russia of the 1830s, the contradictions between the individual and the social structure deteriorated. The social reality, in which the individual has no opportunity to realize himself, symbolizes the valley of tears where Lermontov and his protagonist demon wander as exiled spirits. Within the scope of our study of Lermontov's Demon, the conclusion was reached by examining the fate of the devilin the valley of tears called the world, the writer-hero and Russia of Tsar Nicholas I as the valley of tearsforLermontov. Having started from establishing an identity between the protagonist and the author, the two different approaches within a religious and social framework are used to carry out the evaluations.