Space and Genre in Gogol"s Arabeski

Abstract

ent epochs of his life (PSS 8: 7). In fact, various pieces of Arabeski were written in years immediately preceding publication of collection and most probably with that collection in mind.1 That Gogol' would try to blame flaws of his collection on a problem of time, however, may have less to do with truth than with a vague sense of literature as an art dependent on temporal conditions.2 Despite preface, though, it may be that we should point to space as more dominant condition in Arabeski, and more problematic. Gogols contemporaries often speak of history when they really mean geography, starting with Hegel, who in his Lectures on Philosophy of History (1831) breaks history down into four eras: Oriental World, Greek World, Roman World and German World. Stepan Sevyrev does same in his History of Poetry (Istorija poezii, 1835) when he intends to discuss three periods: the Eastern or Asian, GrecoRoman, and finally German or Christian (Sevyrev 112). Like time without, time within literature tends to turn to space in Romantic consciousness, too, most famously in August Wilhelm Schlegel's distinction between plastic poetry of ancients and pictorial poetry of moderns, a merging of literature with genres marked more obviously by spatial dimensions.3 Space quietly gains this importance for Romantic critics because it offers a better representation than does time of what Romanticism aspires towards. Friedrich Schlegel gave much of impetus to Romanticism when he imagined a new genre which he called variously Romantic genre,