Anthropology of the private world in N. V. Gogol’s Little Russian novels about modernity

Abstract

The relevance of the article is connected with the application of the method of literary anthropology, the study of anthropological forms, for the first time undertaken to a set of N. V. Gogol's Little Russian novels about modernity: "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Auntie", "The Old World Landlords", "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich". The problematic question is how a special narrator and a special world are related. The aims and objectives are connected to the analysis of the narrator's image and images of the characters primarily from the verbal portrait’s point of view, which makes it possible to cover important aspects of the writer's humanistic vision. The emphasis is on how the particular narrator creates a private world with all its subjects and details. The peculiarities of the narrator's image are considered as immersed in everyday life and material things, close to an ordinary common man of Mirgorod. The question is raised about the complication of this image, which, however, did not lead to the wholeness and completeness of the image. The private world created by the special narrator is dominated by special laws that determine the portrayal of the characters. The destruction of the boundaries between human and non-human, external and internal, philistine and divine, leads to the destruction of the world’s hierarchical structure. Another consequence of this is the likening of everything to everything else, the tendency to depict the mass, the similar, the echoing, including the accentuation of imaginary pairing. The singular tends to pairing, the paired tends to the mass-shaped. The destruction of the boundaries between the external and the internal leads to the dominance of corporeality, regardless of whether man is shown as flesh or as form. One can speak of Gogol's dominance of the face over the countenance (Florensky), the dismemberment of the body into parts, the autonomisation and independent life of these parts. An excessive importance is given to the character's costume, which can replace the hero. The traditional description is replaced by an expressive representation of the hero in two variants: representation-in-general and representation-in-the-moment.