Gogol and the Russian literary mind: 1890s-1930s

The period 1890-1930 is particularly important in the history of the reception of Gogol in Russia, for it was the Russian Modernists who undertook a major re-evaluation of the Gogolian heritage. This dissertation focuses on the element which is characteristic of that period--the pattern of correspondences between the vision of Gogol in criticism and the use of Gogolian features in fiction. The very existence of these correspondences stresses Gogol's significance for the literary process in that period.Gogol also served as a vehicle of self-definition for his interpreters. The three cases of correspondences that I discuss illustrate well the course of the development of the Russian Modernist consciousness: first, the neo-Idealist and neo-Romantic awareness of the early Symbolists second, the emerging sensitivity towards the poetics of displacement in late Symbolism finally, the neo-Positivism of the Formalists.In Chapter One I briefly summarize nineteenth-century responses to Gogol and analyze their validity for the subsequent vision of the writer. This chapter ends with the discussion of the role of Vasilii Rozanov in Gogol criticism. In Chapter Two I discuss parallels between the vision of the demonic in Fedor Sologub's novel The Petty Demon (1905), which uses many Gogolian techniques and motifs, and the discussion of Gogol's art in Dmitrii Merezhkovsky's study Gogol and the Devil (1906). Chapter Three deals with the works of Andrei Bely, who appreciated Gogol in his criticism and used many of Gogol's motifs and techniques in his fiction. Chapter Four discusses the theory of Gogol's comic language devices, particularly his comic skaz, as it was put forward by the Formalists and by the near-Formalists V. V. Vinogradov and Aleksandr Slonimsky. This chapter also analyzes the use of the comic skaz technique in the works by their contemporary Mikhail Zoshchenko. In the conclusion I observe that neither the critical nor the "fictional" response is prior to the other one, since both are products of the literary mind, whose creativity depends on references to (an)other text(s).