| The pan-European popularity of the historical novel a la Walter Scott held sway in Russia in the 1820--30s. Curiously, however, Russian literature, despite a number of historical novels, failed to produce works of stature comparable to Scott's, with the exception of Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter. The fact stands out that all three major Russian prose writers of the time (early Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol) tried their hand at the genre. This thesis addresses the understudied issue of the three writers' unsuccessful attempts at the historical novel by investigating what underlies each writer's creative process in transforming historical material into fiction. As Bakhtin argues, genre is a way of seeing and conceptualizing reality and these writers embarked on a search for a new way of negotiating history in this new genre. While their historical fiction shares a common poetics as resting upon mythological imagination, their individual realizations indicate that the source of their mythical imagination varies from one another. This study discusses each writer's distinct mode of mythical imagination.;In his first historical novel The Blackmoor of Peter the Great , Pushkin draws upon the family myth of his own African great-grandfather and superimposes the "genesis" of his family onto the "Genesis" of the Russian Empire, represented by Peter the Great's nation building. Vadim is an intergeneric transposition from the poema to historical fiction. The comparative analysis of Vadim and The Demon demonstrates that Lermontov's historical novel is in essence based upon his personal literary myth. Finally, Gogol's Taras Bul'ba posits another dimension of historical inspiration, as his two versions of the novel illustrate his altered view of history from the perspective of nationalism. If the first "Taras Bul'ba" (1834) in Mirgorod retells an old Ukrainian story of Cossacks, the later redaction (1842) promotes the Russianness of medieval knights vis-a-vis Western Europe. |
PDF Full Text Request