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Iryna Banakh
Belarus, Grodno
It’s about How Pushkin Stumbled against Gogol,
and Gogol Disguised as Pushkin: Deconstruction of the
Writers’ Myths in Russian XX-XXI -century Literature
Summary
The report is devoted to the carnival discrediting of the myth about
friendship and literature continuity of A. S. Pushkin and N. V. Gogol in
Russian literature - the myth which was made up in 1830s under the
influence of the critic essays by V. G. Belinskiy and consolidated after the
poet's tragic death owing to Gogol's memoirs. Genetic prototype of the
myth is a twinned myth, based on the double-natured principle, of the
cultural heroes' twinness. In XX c. on the background of desacralization
primarily of Pushkin's myth as a monomyth of the Russian culture the
history of personal relationships of the both writers also underwent
reconsideration. Begun in 1930s in D. Harms's works ("Pushkin and
Gogol", 1934; "About Pushkin", 1936), picked up in 1970s in "Cheerful
guys" (1971-1972) by N. Dobrokhotova-Majkova and V. Pyatnitskiy,
demythologization turns out to be actual (relevant) up to the present,
continued in the play "Pushkinogopol" (2007) by S. Kokovkin. Historical
joke is selected as a genre model in all the cases, according to the laws of
carnival logic opposing idealized construction of the myth life-decreased
reality. Discrediting the biographic myths, the authors deride dogmatism of
the official thinking, transmuted full of contradictions writers' life into dead
and depersonalized canon.
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