The Mythological Picture of the World of the Slavs in N.V. Gogol's Novella «Viy»

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, one of the priorities in modern Gogol studies has been the study of Gogol's artistic anthropology in its mythological and symbolic characteristics of the Proto-Slavic and Old Slavic worldview. In this regard, the authors of the article set themselves a number of tasks: to characterize the fabulous mythological fiction, to analyze the fabulous mythological fiction of «Mirgorod» and the story «Viy», to justify the translation of the mythological picture of the world of the Slavs through the prism of the writer's creativity. Mythology, in the view of the researchers of this work, appears as a specific way, a method of reproducing reality. The mythological picture of the world has always accompanied man, because behind it there are certain ideas about the world and man's place in this world. Having arisen in the pre-artistic period of the development of literature, it is associated with the imagination, which often uses fantastic assumptions when modeling an image or idea. Thus, the perception of the world through the prism of myth gave rise to a special mythological fiction, whose imagery was embodied in concrete sensory forms. The myth, as a part of oral folk art, does not fully outlast itself over time and continues to influence domestic fiction. This is especially evident in the era of Romanticism, with its ideas about the ambiguity of the world, appeal to the dark sides of the soul, fantastic imagery. For romantics, fiction is a specific form of artistic cognition of the world and man. Gogol, as a bright representative of this era, however, captured in his works not a global myth, but a Slavic one. The story «Viy» occupies a special place in the cycle «Mirgorod». It contains fantasy of a fairy-tale and religious-mythological plan, which is explained by the connections with the genre of the epic and the Slavic myth about the dark spirit, the sender of nightmares and dark visions, as well as Christian ideas about the world-bearer.