The updated values of a soldier of a special military operation: letters from the front 2023

In the context of aggravation of military conflicts throughout the world, including on the territory of Ukraine, it seems important to study the micro-events of the war, the value priorities of its direct participants — the soldiers. The space of war and its time (both in physical and metaphysical terms) seem to be the context where the soldier's axiology is fully revealed. The borderline situation (between life and death) creates tension and exacerbates existential choice. The main method is the analysis of ego-documents, front-line letters from participants in a special military operation addressed to children. Letters from participants in the special military operation were taken from an open source, a telegram channel of a volunteer group, with the consent of their moderator and the addressees themselves. The methodology of textual analysis is based on the ideas of “national unity”, “national religiosity”, the connectedness of Russian people according to the type of family relationships during the war, taken in one of the most iconic novels about the war, L. N. Tolstoy's epic novel “War and Peace”; N. A. Berdyaev's idea about the symbolic nature of war, which does not give birth to evil, but reveals it, and his focus on the messianic role of Russia in the military conflicts of the world; on the civilizational approach of N. Ya. Danilevsky, who sees in war a source of historical development and the formation of cultural and historical types. The results of the study substantiate the evidence of the hypothesis that axiology itself has its foundations in the cultural patterns of Russian literature as a basic component of the school curriculum, and is also imprinted in the works of Russian philosophers who accumulated the worldview experience of previous generations. The study established the presence in the axiology of soldiers of a special military operation of a reference point to messianism and the manifestation of the characteristics of the cultural and historical type of Russia. The space and time of war forces soldiers to turn to them and strengthens archetypal value foundations, actualizes historical memory and confirms its exceptional significance.

special military operation, values, updated values, Russian army soldier, ego documents, letters from the front