Gogol’s traditions in V. Kaverin’s novel “The Troublemaker, or Evenings on Vasilyevsky Island”

Abstract

The novel The Troublemaker, or Evenings on Vasilyevsky Island by V. Kaverin is one of the most representative manifestations of the Russian Hoffmanian of the 1920s, as evidenced by the grotesque imagery of the novel. The very understanding of the grotesque is not limited to the Bakhtin theory, but implies a reference to the works of V. Kaiser and V. Shklovsky. Besides, it is suggested that the Saint Petersburg theme, which is relevant to the writer, is being developed under the banner of the formalist concept of literary life, as well as other ideas and theories of Russian formalism (including the theory of alienation). Kaverin succeeds in putting not only literature itself into the context of the Saint Petersburg myth, but also literature studies, which makes it possible to talk about the work as one of the brightest embodiments of the philological novel, the most important characteristic of which is the accentuated intertextual beginning. The work asserts that motives and themes, images and details, syntactic constructions, and even a composition (including a chronotope) of V. Kaverins first novel fits into Gogols system of coordinates. The Kaverins text is a construction assembled from fragments and details of Gogols text according to Gogols own rules.