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Studying the work of Russian writers from the perspective of modern literary approaches is one of the leading problems of the theory and history of literature. Many research works are written within that framework. Designed on the basis of such an approach, this article is devoted to the analysis of one of the aspects of A. F. Pisemsky’s novel «Men of the Forties». We examined the image of the novel’s protagonist, Pavel Vikhrov, from the point of view of his committing an actively responsible act marking his place in the world. The central problem of the article is the cognitive modeling of the act of a literary hero. The article studies the nature of the act of a literary hero in the artistic space of a Russian novel; the capacity of the cognitive approach to studying the behavior of a literary hero is analyzed. The performer of the act is a hero introduced into a number of literary universals, i.e. «a man of the forties». The novelty of the research work is largely determined by the combination of literary research methods and the technologies of categorical-system and cognitive analysis of texts. The result of the analysis is an algorithm for creating a model of the act of a literary hero and applying it to a specific work. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the description of the act of a literary hero using cognitive models allows: firstly, to understand the motives of the act of A. F. Pisemsky’s hero; secondly, to discover the essence of this act; thirdly, to study the features of A. F. Pisemsky’s artistic picture of the world through the act of a literary hero.

The article discusses the problem of the "act of a literary hero" in the historical and literary process. It is shown on the example of the category "act of a literary hero" that the idea of a literary hero and his act underwent changes in various historical and literary periods. Such changes were the result of the crisis processes that accompanied the transformation in the picture of the world. It is necessary to identify key aspects that allow us to talk about a change in the literary paradigm, which includes ideas about the literary hero and his deed. The "finite information flow" model was used for this; it is an instrument of categorical-systemic methodology. Thus, the reasons for changing ideas about the act of a literary hero are revealed. These reasons include the design of individual phases of the historical and literary process; changing the picture of the world; the formation of the novel genre, the subject of the image of which is the alienation between the hero and the world. The expediency of using the "finite information flow" model in literary criticism is proved.