“Apostle” Project as a Trial: Character of Irina Sushko within System of Personae in V. F. Tendryakov's Novel-Essay “The Assault on Mirages”

This study examines the character of Irina Mikhailovna Sushko as a pivotal semantic dominant essential for decoding the philosophical and aesthetic framework of V. F. Tendryakov's novel-essay “The Assault on Mirages” (1982). The author's final novel remains insufficiently explored in terms of its character system and artistic characterology. The paper analyzes the character's structuring function within the science-fictional experiment conducted by Professor Georgy Grebin, which aims to “excise” Jesus Christ from the historical process. The creative genesis of Irina Sushko's image provides a lens through which to trace how the boundaries of scientific rationalism and its collision with ethical and religious values were conceptualized in late-Soviet literature. It is demonstrated that through Sushko's personality, actions, and internal contradictions, the central problems of the novelessay are revealed, including the relationship between morality and religion, the moral responsibility of the scientist, the identity crisis of the Soviet intellectual during the late socialism era, as well as human experiments with cyber-intelligence. Special attention is paid to the internal dynamics and polyphony of the character under analysis. The novelty of this research lies in identifying motivic (doubling) and intertextual parallels that link the heroine to “eternal” literary images and archetypal figures, such as the "filibusters" from P. D. Kogan's poem-song, the Wandering Jew (Ahasuerus), Mary Magdalene, and the Apostle Thomas the Twin (Didymus).

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