Nikolay Gogol's work with “a modest titleˮ: “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friendsˮ

Abstract

For the first time, scientific attention has been paid to the title of Nikolai Gogol’s book “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends”. The article examines the author's paradoxical choice of the word “correspondenceˮ, although the book includes only Gogol’s letters to friends. The author of the article attempts to explain the noted contradiction. It is emphasised that Gogol was going to give the book a name familiar to the reader (a “not noisyˮ one). Special attention is paid to the perception of Gogol's book title by the first readers of Correspondence with Friends in 1847–1848. Proceeding from the fact that contemporaries perceived the title through the prism of their understanding of the genre of the book, the author of the article comes to the conclusion: the older generation of literary readers (Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Turgenev, Pyotr Pletnyov) was closest to Gogol’s understanding of epistolary dialogue as a dialogue between the writer and the reader. As a result, certain clarifications are made to the modern scientific understanding of the genre features of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friendsˮ and about Gogol's authorial intentions in choosing a name that indicates the dialogical essence of his statements.