The article examines books that are read or mentioned by characters in several of Gogol’s works. It demonstrates that the interest in books—and the attitude toward them—displayed by Gogol’s characters reflects specific aspects of their personalities. Books are also considered as material objects that are part of the material world surrounding a particular character. An analysis of Gogol’s works shows that his characters have not developed a habit of reading and lack not only the ability but also the desire and need to read. When they do turn to a book, they tend more to imitate the act of reading than to engage in genuine reading. As their interests are in no way connected with reading, they appear more as non-readers than as readers. The article argues that Gogol does not draw a clear distinction between characters on this basis: he does not oppose types of non-readers to types of readers. Readers appear as non-readers in his works; it is another matter how and what they read. In those few works where books are present, Gogol treats the act of reading with undisguised irony. All these points are illustrated in the article with specific examples. The analysis draws on such works by Gogol as Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt, Diary of a Madman, The Inspector General, and Dead Souls. The analysis reveals that Gogol’s characters combine, each in their own way, traits of both readers and non-readers. The specific form in which a book appears in Gogol’s works directly reflects the particular configuration of these traits.

We take a look at Gogol’s correspondence with Vielgorsky sisters that concerns his aid in their botanical endeavors. We specify the character of the writer’s relationship with Anna Vielgorskaya, as his marriage proposal to her became a point of controversy among Gogol’s biographers. We point that for Anna, botanical studies were a means of studying Russia as she strived to “to become Russian in soul and not merely in name”. We trace the connection of Gogol’s botanical texts of 1840s–1850s to his work on the second volume of “Dead Souls” and a Russian Geography for the youth.

The article examines “Lucius, or the First Tale” (1842), written by O. I. Senkovsky under the pseudonym B. B. and loosely based on “Lucius, or the Ass” (Λούκιος ἢ ῎Oνος), one of the works preserved in the classic corpus of Lucian’s texts. The study refutes the established critical opinion (rooted in V. G. Belinsky’s views) about the text as an “unsuccessful distortion” of Apuleius’s “Golden Ass” and reveals its multi-layered nature. It is argued that Senkovsky’s “Lucius” was a bold literary experiment that synthesized creative translation, adapted retelling and classic stylization, elements of a scientific article, parody and feuilleton. Senkovsky’s techniques of working with the classic text included the introduction of realities and language of 19th century Russia, dialogization, censorship, the creation of a double chronotope, and author’s insertions. The role of the literary mask was crucial: the name of B. B. (Baron Brambeus) relieved Senkovsky the professor of literature of responsibility for his loose handling of the ancient Greek text and allowed Senkovsky the editor to join the magazine polemics without violating the principle of responding to critics’ attacks with silence proclaimed by the “Library for Reading”. The analysis of “Lucius” by B. B. reveals that the publication of the story was Senkovsky’s witty response to criticism from Belinsky and the controversy surrounding N. V. Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls.” Hidden parodic references to Belinsky’s articles on Russian novels and on Gogol’s works are identified through a detailed comparison of the texts. The article highlights Senkovsky’s use of the ass theme to create satirical portraits of his contemporaries, K. S. Aksakov, S. P. Shevyrev, and S. S. Uvarov. The image of the “donkey-philosopher” is interpreted as a metaphor of a thinking person in society and among the highly educated elite. The authors conclude that Senkovsky’s “Lucius” is not a marginal text, but an important phenomenon in the history of Russian satirical prose and magazine polemics of the 1840s, which requires re-evaluation and further study in the context of Senkovsky’s work and the literary process of his time.

The research aims to identify and substantiate Chernyshevsky’s views on Gogol’s later works, which contradict Belinsky’s negative assessment (“Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends”). In the context of the journal discussion of Gogol’s posthumously published works (“Author’s Confession”, fragments of the second volume of “Dead Souls”, letters), Chernyshevsky’s reviews and articles from the 1850s related to Gogol are analyzed. The formation of the critic’s concept of the integrity of Gogol’s personality and work is considered. The phenomenological features of Chernyshevsky’s thinking are revealed, expressed in contradictions between the theoretical criteria for evaluating the work of the artist, substantiated by him in “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality”, a number of articles, and the direct personal aesthetic perception of Gogol. Scientific novelty is determined by the nature of scientific reception, which involves analyzing what Chernyshevsky wrote in a phenomenological projection: fixing the duality of the letter structure, which creates conditions for the manifestation of rational-logical thinking and the direct aesthetic impression contradicting it within the framework of one statement. As a result of the research, the need to correct the established idea in the history of criticism about Chernyshevsky’s solidarity with Belinsky in the approach to Gogol’s later works, as well as about the immutability of Chernyshevsky’s views on the nature and purpose of art within the framework of “real criticism” is substantiated.

In recent decades, the study of aspect typology, which involves examining different aspectual meanings and their expression across various languages, has advanced significantly. Challenges arise in transferring aspectual semantic components into another language, especially when the target language lacks a corresponding grammatical category. To facilitate the transfer of Russian verb forms’ semantic nuances into Vietnamese, this research employs an onomasiological approach. This approach helps to overcome terminological diversity and allows us to present the object of comparison as transparently as possible: from semantic features to the means of their expression in different languages. The aim of this article is to identify how Vietnamese conveys the particular aspectual meanings of Russian verbs and to determine the patterns of their use in translating Gogol’s Dead Souls. The study analyzes verb forms from the first three chapters of the text (1034 instances and an equal number of Vietnamese equivalents) selected through continuous sampling method. The analysis reveals that Vietnamese has many specialized words capable of expressing aspectual features. For instance, particles such as đã, xong, rồi, được, hết, lên are used to express integrity and efficiency associated with perfective verbs. Meanwhile, words like cứ, mãi, vẫn, còn, được, có, lại convey meanings of processiveness, repetition, and general-factual significance, which are key aspectual meanings of imperfective verbs. A notable feature of Vietnamese is that the necessity of these specialized words can vary, and aspectual indicators might not always be needed if the aspectual semantics are supported by context. Our observations suggest that contextual elements play a significant role in cases involving imperfective verbs. The analysis indicates that perfective meanings do not require contextual elements, and the Vietnamese perfective markers may not be used. This is because perfective verbs describe single, completed events or situations at a specific point in the past. In narrative texts, which present past events as a sequence of actions, perfective verbs are prevalent. As a result, Vietnamese readers, lacking explicit perfective markers and contextual aids, may interpret these actions as single, completed events with a specific outcome.

The review concerns a study devoted to one of the most mysterious episodes in the history of Russian literature — the burnt second and the unwritten third volumes of Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls [Myortvie dushi]. Upon studying memoirs and archived materials, E. Dmitrieva employs her as ever meticulous research and characteristically engaging narration to reconstruct various aspects of the story: from the first idea of the sequel to the burning of the manuscript and the sensational discovery of an early draft of the first five chapters from part two some six months upon the author’s demise in a turn of events fit for a detective story. Dmitrieva elaborates on the destiny of the manuscript and the book’s genesis, poetics, and hermeneutics, as well as mystifications around, and parodies/stylizations of, Dead Souls. The study clearly demonstrates the scholar’s profound knowledge of Gogol’s oeuvre and mastery of relevant critical literature and memoirs, combined with her ability to relate that knowledge in a succinct form, uncover the hidden, and captivate the reader with her perceptive hypotheses and compellingly argued interpretations.

The article discusses numerous interpretative problems related to the short novel “The Carriage” (1835‒1836) by Nikolai Gogol. It is proposed to solve the problem of an adequate reading of the short novel by identifying the maximum possible number of “end-to-end” and nodal themes and motifs that are constant in all of Gogol’s work. Numerous reminiscences of “The Carriage” are noted with other works of the writer, i.e., the short novels “The Night Before Christmas,” “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka...,” “Old World Landowners,” “Taras Bulba,” “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” the poem “Dead Souls,” the comedies “The Inspector,” “Marriage,” “Players,” etc. Based on the analysis, a special place of the short novel in Gogol’s legacy is established. An important feature of “The Carriage” is its significant “intermediate” position among Gogol’s other works, not only chronologically, but also in terms of genre. In “The Carriage” the writer’s transition from the depiction of Little Russian everyday life to the all-Russian scale takes place: the creation of the short novel was preceded by work on the short novels of two Ukrainian cycles — “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” and “Mirgorod”; after “The Carriage” Gogol turned to the image of the “prefabricated” city in “The Inspector” and a wide panorama of Russian life in “Dead Souls.” “The Carriage” occupies an “intermediate” place in Gogol’s understanding of the problems of the capital and the province in relation to the realities of traditional Russian life and European influence. The writer’s characteristic desire for an encyclopedic coverage of phenomena during the creation of “The Carriage” received the most complete expression at that time. The short novel served as a preliminary step to the creation of Gogol’s main poem, and by many indications, it can be considered as the writer’s full-fledged experience in creating a small poem. The spiritual and moral intent of the short novel is analyzed in detail, the problems of realism of “Dead Souls” and “The Carriage” are touched upon, Pushkin’s influence on Gogol’s work and the autobiographic nature of “The Carriage” are noted.

INTRODUCTION. The relevance of the research is due to the lack of works analyzing the specifics of A.K. Tolstoy’s reception of the natural school traditions. The purpose of the research is to discover physiological techniques in the writer’s early prose, analyze its intertextual connections and identify its ideological and artistic originality.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material is the story by A.K. Tolstoy “Artemy Semenovich Bervenkovsky” (1845). The historicalliterary method, contextual, comparative and ideological-thematic analysis, and descriptive method are used.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. In the work, the life of a provincial landowner is satirically depicted by means of the detailing the narrative technique and developing the dialogic conflict between the “dreamer” and the “practitioner”. Connections have been found with “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” and the poem “Dead Souls” by N.V. Gogol, the anthem “Let the Thunder of Victory Resound!..” with lyrics by G.R. Derzhavin and music by O.A. Kozlovsky. In A.K. Tolstoy’s story, as in “The Tale...”, the comic-travesty atmosphere of the narrative is recreated, and techniques of the absurd, grotesque and wordplay are used; a connection can be traced with the semantics that comes from the genre designations of “Dead Souls” as a road novel and a poem, which respectively suggest an examination of typical phenomena of Russian life and a philosophical reflection on the fate of Russia and the meaning of the existence of a Russian landowner. The ideological and artistic originality of the story lies in the criticism of the system of views and life aspirations of the main character.CONCLUSION. The obtained results can be applied in the course of Russian literature of the 19th century (second third), in special courses devoted to the study of the A.K. Tolstoy’s works. The prospects of the research are seen in the further study of the writer’s dialogue with the natural school.

This article attempts to uncover the metaphysical theories in the background of Robert Kirk’s description of ‘Subterraneans’ in his Secret Commonwealth. In doing so, it shows that Kirk’s Platonism seems directly derived from the philosophy of Henry More. Starting with a comparison between Kirk’s and More’s descriptions of the afterlife and the community of spirits, the article goes on to show how More’s theory of aerial bodies provides an ideal framework for interpreting Kirk, by resolving the problem of how Subterraneans relate to angels and to dead souls. Beyond these structural similarities, it is also shown that Kirk works with specifically Morean notions and at times seems to echo his words. While a comparable level of structural similarity may be found between Kirk and Paracelsus, it is shown that the background metaphysics are very different in these two authors.

The aim of the research is to identify the linguistic representation of the communicative strategies and tactics of the trickster in the speech of Chichikov, the main character of N. V. Gogol's "Dead Souls." The article examines 166 remarks of Chichikov collected from the text of the work, which are analyzed from the point of view of the use of figurative language, emotionally evaluative vocabulary, types of sentences, and pragmatic strategies and tactics. The scientific novelty lies in the systematic study of the linguistic means and speech strategies of the trickster on the example of N. V. Gogol's "Dead Souls." The complex methodology for studying the linguistic phenomenon of tricksterism using the analysis of lexical, syntactic, stylistic means, as well as identifying the pragmatic characteristics of speech behavior that objectify the image of the trickster in speech based on statistical data, is innovative. As a result of the study, it is shown that N. V. Gogol, through carefully developed linguistic characteristics, created the image of Chichikov as a classic trickster. The most common figurative means in Chichikov's remarks (irony, metaphor, hyperbole), which enhance the trickster image, are established; the frequency of use of emotionally evaluative vocabulary is analyzed; the distribution of emotional shades is clarified in accordance with a specific communicative situation; and the pragmatic strategies and tactics implemented in the speech of the main character of the story are identified and described: the speech strategy of pragmatic uncertainty, the tactic of hinting, the tactic of formalization in speech, the tactic of reducing certainty, the use of hedges, the tactic of "false modesty" and maintaining confidentiality.

In the lyrics of Sergei Stratanovsky there are quite frequent references to works of Russian classical literature, to the persons of classical writers; first of all, these are Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky. Stratanovsky’s “literary” poems are very elegantly organized in the subjective plane: sometimes classical writers and the heroes of their works are presented from the point of view of a subject who seems to be observing them, but there are also such texts where the explicit subject is a role-playing one: for example, Bulgakov’s Sharikov or Shatov from Dostoevsky’s “Demons”. There are also poems with an impersonal subject, who can rightfully be called a lyrical hero (“Fantasies on the Themes of Gogol”, partly “Boldin Reflections”). The article examines those poems byStratanovsky related to Russian classical literature that are constructed in the form of role-playing lyrics, but the subject in them is impersonal, that is, is not directly explicated by the first person - neither by a pronoun nor by a verb: these are the poems “Oblomov”, “Prince Myshkin”, “Gogol Writes the Second Volume of Dead Souls”. Each of them presents the point of view of the character brought out in the title, but formally this is not done on behalf of the character. Observations show that in the three poems examined, the author puts his own reflection into the reflection of the hero of the classical text or the writer who created the classical text. As a result, it turns out that the impersonal role-playing subject, in contrast to the simply impersonal subject and the grammatically explicated role-playing subject, turns out to be inside the depicted world, and not outside of it, and comes closer to the author, becoming in fact a lyrical hero. That is, such a non-trivial way of subjective organization allows the poet to understand himself through another.

In the fall of 2024, NYRB Classics celebrated its 25th anniversary. Since its launch on September 30, 1999, the series has published over 500 titles of world literature in modern and accessible translations, ranging from Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica to Oğuz Atay’s Waiting for the Fear, as well as all-time masterpieces like Balzac’s Human Comedy, Gogol’s Dead Souls, and Dante’s Inferno. But what exactly does an American publisher do to, and for, the “classics”? This past summer, I corresponded with Edwin Frank to learn more about his commitment to a more diverse canon and the processes that bring international literature to our domestic bookshelves. Frank defines a “classic” as a work that has some relation to history, a book with “recognizable authority, originality, individuality, and truth to experience, one that attests to the circumstances…out of which it arises, while also rising above them enough to suggest something else, beyond or within” (The Red Thread, xv). He is himself something of a living library, for many of the books included in the series are those he himself rediscovered at various points in his life. For instance, while freelancing for an outlet called Reader’s Catalog in the late ’90s, he found out that much of the great literature he admired was not in print.

This article investigates economic aspects of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls based on the pragmatic triad consisting of such components as the author — the text — the reader. The reader, being an investigator, can perceive the text independently and analyze the actions of the characters as if they took place in real life. Pavel Chichikov’s project of purchasing dead souls is considered as a standard investment project which can be analyzed accordingly. Gogol was not planning to describe a certain town at a certain time. However, the text itself gives enough information to conclude that the novel is set in Pskov in the beginning of the 1830s and spans three weeks. Chichikov’s aim is to accumulate collateral sufficient to apply for a loan to the Treasury, so called Sokhrannaya Kazna. During intervals between population census dead peasants continued to be registered as alive, and for banks these were the documents that really mattered. Chichikov was planning to buy dead souls for a bargain price, to mortgage them in a bank and to receive a loan of 200 roubles for a soul. Overall, Chichikov became the owner of nearly 400 souls (our estimation shows that in fact there were 395 souls). Manilov transferred him souls as a gift. Korobochka received from Chichikov 16 roubles, Sobakevich — 187 roubles and 50 kopeks (according to our calculation), Plushkin — 24 roubles and 96 kopeks. Total Chichikov’s purchase costs were about 228 roubles. A simple calculation shows that with 395 souls bought for 228 roubles an average price for one soul was 58 kopeks. Expenditures for registration were 412 roubles. Adding the bribe, he had to give to an official, that was 437 roubles, which exceeded the sum he spent for purchasing dead souls. If we consider that the Treasury’s commission amounted to 1.5% of the loan, Chichikov could have received 77 815 roubles, which makes it a perfect bargain. However, Chichikov made serious mistakes. His marketing was too much aggressive — he should not have had dealings with Korobochka and Nozdrjov. Above all, he should not have stayed in the town after having registered his purchases. As a result, the truth was revealed due to the leak of information about the purchase of dead souls. Chichikov had to leave the town in great haste. Judging from the remaining chapters of the second volume of Dead Souls, the project of receiving a loan was not completed.

The article is devoted to the investigation of the cultural-anthropological aspects of structuring the human lifeworld, with a particular focus on the role of the horrific in the ontological structures of the personality. Special emphasis is placed on the social modifications of the phenomenon of the horrific in historical retrospect and in the framework conditions of contemporary Ukrainian society, where the horrific acquires an ontological status in models of life-creating activity during the wartime period. The study of the phenomenon of the horrific, carried out within the landscapes of the life-creating activity of a Ukrainian existential-anthropological philosopher, and the overcoming in the public consciousness of Ukrainians of the dogmatic understanding of Gogol exclusively as a Russian writer, occurred only during the era of independence. The inner drama of M. Gogol, which revolved around the torment of searching for his own identity, is today actualized by the military aggression of the Russian Federation, directed against the statehood, freedom, independence, and the right to free choice of Ukraine, which displays all the characteristics of overt ressentiment. Gogol's opposition of the living/the dead, the beautiful/the horrific, becomes ever more relevant in present-day practices, as a confrontation of the Ukrainian living world against the Russian dead world. The phenomenon of the horrific is comprehended and interpreted by M. Gogol as a complex sociocultural formation, rooted in the deep layers of ethnonational being and possessing a specific way of experiencing the horrific. Gogol's philosophy of horror presents several invariants: horror as an aesthetic effect – the fear of the “revelation” of the Other within oneself or the acquisition of “forbidden knowledge”; horror as a transgression of the boundary between the living/the dead, the corporeal/the sacred; fear as the core of human experience; fear as a mechanism of marginalization, etc. The phenomenon of the horrific is explored by the author on several levels – the mystical (“Viy”), the social (“The Government Inspector”), the existential (“The Overcoat”), and the metaphysical (“Dead Souls”). The horrific appears not only in literary creativity but also in the artist's life project, as evidenced by his epistolary legacy, religious quests, and life crises, as well as attempts at selfcreation, preserved in his spiritual biography and autobiographical texts. It is established that the dialectic of the beautiful and the horrific in Gogol's works is presented as the coexistence of the world of “living” and “dead” souls within the ontological perspective of the postcolonial elevation of the Ukrainian world and the personal-existential search for one's own identity. For Gogol, the comprehension of the horrific is not only a means of philosophical and literary cognition of reality but also the result of personal existential work within the practices of his own life-creation.

The article examines the hypothesis about the correlation between the content of The Undertaker by Alexander Pushkin and that of the Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. The theme of both texts is not simply the question of human life and death, but how this question relates to the laws of capitalist economy. As is known, Karl Marx will define capital as dead labor, which, like a vampire, feeds on living labor. In this sense, we can talk about economy as an “interface” between life and death. In the article we are trying to show that at the pre-theoretical level, a similar conclusion was made by Pushkin and Gogol even before Marx. The undertaker Adrian Prokhorov and the adventurer Pavel Chichikov (the main characters of Pushkin’s story and Gogol’s poem) are entrepreneurs whose “business” is based on involving the dead in the process of commodity-money circulation. Within this process, both the living and the dead are of interest only as sources of value, the “salvation” of which is the sole purpose of capital. In this context, the function of two ghostly characters, Sergeant Kurilkin in The Undertaker and Captain Kopeikin in the Dead Souls becomes clear: both of them raise the question of life on the other side of value.

The article analyzes the new memoir narratives discovered in the writer’s archive. Thematically and stylistically, they carry on the tradition of Remizov’s 1950s essays on the Dead Souls, based on the literary analysis of the classic’s style as construed in Andrei Bely’s book Gogol’s Mastership (1934). In both essays, a hyperbolized symbol, representing the «grain» of the character’s image, forms a lyrical plot that shapes itself around it. The drafts of the essays about N. Berdyaev and V. Lebedev preserved in the writer’s notebooks testify to the beginning of a new stage of Remizov’s creative career as a memoirist.

The task of adequately understanding Gogol’s legacy became acute for Russian science in the early 1990s. Gogol’s own comments on his works, in particular, the play The Denouement of the Government Inspector (1846), where the writer suggested seeing in the officials of his comedy the “spiritual city” of each person on the last “inspection” of the “incorruptible Government Inspector,” were for a long time considered “invented” and imposed retroactively, not corresponding to the meaning of his work. The article proves the inconsistency of preconceived opinions. The connection between the problems of The Denouement... is consistently examined not only with The Government Inspector but also with other Gogol’s works, early and late, such as the poem Ganz Küchelgarten (1827–1829), Taras Bulba (1834–1842), the drama Alfred (1835), the article “Woman” (1831), The Gamblers (1832–1842), Theatrical Passage... (1836–1842), the first volume of Dead Souls (1835–1842), a separate sketch for the finale of the poem (1843–1845), etc. The article examines the issue of the sources of Gogol’s artistic and historical philosophical concept and the reflection of the writer’s personal life experience in it.

The article is devoted to an in-depth study of two interconnected Gogol’s plans of the mid-1830s: the historical “Arabic” article “Al-Mamun,” and the unfinished drama from English history “Alfred.” The article considers the typological and genetic relationship of the two works, their connection with other works of the writer. It gives a detailed analysis to the origin of the plans for the article and the drama, dating back to Gogol’s university lectures on the history of the early Middle Ages of the 8th–9th centuries. The article establishes that in the depiction of the Arab and English worlds, Gogol posed common problems of statehood: using the example of the Arab “righteous” caliph Harun, he traced the history of the “great empire” of Mohammedanism; in the deeds of the English king St. Alfred the Great, he addressed the era of the birth of the British Empire. The research pays particular attention to the analysis of a single ideological and artistic plan, part of which are “Al-Mamun” and “Alfred.” The article establishes that Gogol’s integral concept is based on reflections not only on the history of Western Europe and the Arab East, but also on the Byzantine and Russian heritage. In addition to “Al-Mamun” and “Alfred,” this Gogolian historical concept was reflected in the idea of his story “Old-World Landowners,” was reflected in the content of the first chapter of the second volume of Dead Souls, and is developed in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. The article summarizes the main results of Gogol’s British and oriental studies. According to the writer’s conclusions, ill-considered reformism, political and spiritual radicalism always lead, despite the stated goals, to negative results. True social improvement is possible, according to Gogol, only on the basis of Christianity and reasonable state administration, taking into account the interests of all classes and the level of spiritual and moral education of society as a whole.

The article examines the fairy tale by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin “Chizhikov’s Grief.” Up until now, researchers have not taken into account certain significant circumstances when interpreting “Chizhikov’s Grief.” First of all, it is the unusual love and family theme of the tale, which is not characteristic of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s work (moreover, it was repeatedly criticized by him as ‘outdated’); and, secondly, the publication of the tale in the Christmas issue of “Russkie Vedomosti,” which provides reason to consider its text within the “Christmas story” tradition. The theme of love and family and the peculiarities of the poetics of “Chizhikov’s Grief” suggest that the fairy tale contains elements of intertextuality: it “refers” the reader, on the one hand, to the tradition of the naturalistic novel popular in the 1870s — 1880s, and on the other hand — to the Christmas stories by Ch. Dickens. M. E. Saltykov was critical of naturalist writers, opposing them to Ch. Dickens and N. V. Gogol. This contradiction is reflected in the structure of “Chizhikov’s Grief,” where the first part of the tale contains elements of parody of the naturalistic novel’s poetics (i.e., in E. Zola’s work), and the second part resembles the plot model of Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” (the transformation of the “misanthropic hero” who travels the path with “guilt-correction-redemption” as the key milestones). Analyzing the poetics of “Chizhikov’s Grief” allows to understand the author’s concept of the fairy tale: critically comparing the “earthiness” of the naturalist writers and the “idealism” of Ch. Dickens and N. V. Gogol, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin emphasizes the importance of the ideal component of private life. The problem of love and marriage is resolved in “Chizhikov’s Grief” in the style of the Christmas (Easter) tradition: sublime love revives the dead soul of the hero, while in the tale’s open ending the only positive variant of conflict resolution is the heroes’ acquisition of Christian values: forgiveness and love. Thus, behind the numerous literary contexts, irony and satire, the tale conceals a moral absolute that’s distinctive to the national consciousness; and this absolute was the personal position of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin

This article is the first scholarly comprehensive study of the stage history and critical reception of Nikolai Gogol on the Lublin Stage (Poland) from 1869 up to 1939. The work fills a gap in theatrical research. The author describes unknown facts, Gogol’s unpublished stage history on the example of Lublin, within a historical and cultural context (the time of the Russian Partition of Poland), and then in the post-independence period in Poland (1918-1939). The study was based on source materials (press and archival materials). The following aspects are studied: artistic creations, the means of artistic expressions, audience reactions and critics’ opinions. The Government Inspector (Revisor) was mostly staged in The Lublin Theatre, although views on the work’s meaning changed. The subject of attention is both the stagings of Gogol’ plays in Polish (from the Lublin’s première of The Government Inspector in 1890) and performances in the original language: the same play by Russian amateurs (1869), of Imperial drama troupes (e.g., The Government Inspector directed by N. Arbenin in the late 19th century), and of the Stanislavsky Theatre (1931). Among Gogol’s plays and adaptations performed on the Lublin stage were The Marriage (at the School Theatre, 1900; a guest première of the Zelwerowicz ensemble, in Polish, 1909 and the Stanislavsky Theatre, in Russian, in 1931), Dead Souls (1897, in the original), as well as: Taras Bulba (1897), The Viy with supernatural elements (1901, 1902), A May Night (1902) staged as a guest performance by Ukrainian theatre companies.