OUT OF TIME CHARACTERS IN LITERARY WORKS OF 1859: “FAMILY HAPPINESS” BY LEV TOLSTOY, “OBLOMOV” BY IVAN GONCHAROV, “A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK” BY IVAN TURGENEV

Abstract

The article is a comparative structural, thematic and genre analysis of the works by Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Goncharov. The study had the following objectives: to give the genre definitions of “Family Happiness”, “Oblomov” and “A House of Gentlefolk” on the basis of structural, ideological and thematic features of the works; to compare the novels of Turgenev and Goncharov as different genre modifications; to justify the ideological character of the novel “A House of Gentlefolk”; to analyze the ideological controversy of the characters of Turgenev’s novel. As a result, the following conclusions were made. Tolstoy's “Family Happiness:, which is traditionally identified as a novel, in this case should be qualified as a novella: it has the predominant point of view which belongs to the narrator; the subject of the description are the episodes of private life presented outside of the socio-historical context of the era. Goncharov's “Oblomov” and Turgenev's “A House of Gentlefolk” present a multi-faceted, epically voluminous, large-scale picture of reality in two fundamentally different versions of the genre novel modifications. Despite the fact that in both novels the main characters are out of time, both works recreate the pre-reform atmosphere of the late 1850s, but perform it in fundamentally different ways. A mythologically-generalized, elegiac image of the past serfdom of Russia is presented in “Oblomov”. In “A House of Gentlefolk” the socio-historical specificity appears in close connection with real historical events, the lyrical beginning is organically combined with the polemical acuteness of the problem. The plot and the destinies of the characters in Turgenev's novel are determined by the ideological controversy, in which not only the main but also the secondary characters are subjectively or objectively involved, which ultimately determines the ideological character of the work. The proposed genre differentiation of the works of the three leading writers of the era allows us to give a dynamic cross-section of the literary process of the second half of the XIX century in the defining 1859 year of this period.