On the dialogism of genre nature of the concept of “Selected passages from correspondence with friends”: notes on the margins of the book by Iu. V. Mann “In search of a living soul...”

Abstract

The issue of the genre nature of “Selected passages from correspondence with friends” is one of the oldest, most significant and yet actual problems of studying Gogol’s latest book. The first readers and critics faced this problem in 1847. Since then, interest in the genre of the book has been followed by special attention to its creative history. At the same time, it is well known that the book was created during Gogol’s work on the second volume of “Dead Souls” and that Gogol involved a wide range of close and distant readers in this process. This was discussed by Yu.V. Mann in his book “In search of a living soul: ‘Dead Souls’. Writer – criticism – reader” (published in 1984), where the long-lasting writer-reader dialogue is presented with factual and documentary details. In this context, Yu.V. Mann made observations, that are important for understanding the genre origins of the concept of “Selected passages ...”. Over the 40 years since that, the scholarly stockpile of studying Gogol’s work has been significantly expanded, and now we can appreciate and develop the scholarly resource of Mann’s observations about the dialogical origins of its idea.