The formula «To kill a mandarin» goes back to Balzac’s novel «Father Gorio». It is a crime without punishment and visible bloodshed. The ethical problem posed by the philosophers of the eighteenth century was widely developed in the literature of the nineteenth century, and then was perceived by the latest mass culture, most often in a playful way and more entertaining than moralistic.
Keywords
Balzac; Chateaubriand; Diderot; Dostoevsky; literary plots; moral dilemmas.