The article presents the results of our research into the contextual contents of the literature situation in 1850s-1870s. It has been found that the philosophical and religious dispute between nihilists and anti-nihilists was fully revealed in the polemic co-existence of the nihilistic and anti-nihilistic novels. The importance of both anti-nihilistic novel-writing and anti-nihilist movements in general is determined by the foregrounding of the Christian spiritual tradition which stands against Western-European materialistic doctrine as foreign, strange and inappropriate to Russian spirituality. At the heart of the polemic was the problem of understanding man's nature that was reflected in the concepts-images «New Man» and «Nihilist» as well as in several polemic contextual and structural elements of the nihilistic and anti-nihilistic novels: a novel conflict, a system of images, a complex of motifs, character analysis, etc.
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