About the author:
Maria S. Akimova — PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; Senior Researcher, Museum of Zelenograd, Gogol str., 11B, 124575 Zelenograd, Moscow, Russia.
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ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6051-3949
Abstract:
The article uses the example of two autobiographical loci (“native corner” — the Moscow city estate, where S.N. Durylin (1886–1954) spent his childhood, and “his corner” — the rural estate house in Bolshevo near Moscow, where his life ended) to show the variability and mutational potential of the “estate topos” of the 20th century in Durylin’s work, the role of the estate in his life, the ratio of its real and literary appearance. The estate world in Durylin’s literary memoirs “In the native corner” (1930– 1942) is theoanthropic and hierarchically centered, thanks to which the poetosphere of the estate becomes a conjugation of the objective (bodily), spiritual and spiritual principles, with the predominance of the latter two. The images of a house as a person and a person as a spiritual home go back to the parable about building houses on stone or on sand, told by Christ to his disciples (Matthew 7: 24–27). The traditional spiritual and anthropological estate reality that lived in Durylin’s memory was recreated physically as a cast from the ideal-mental reality: “his corner” was built in 1936 from fragments of buildings of the destroyed Moscow Passion Monastery, as if repeating the “monastic” architecture of the “native corner” in Pleteshki. The iconic image of the house-estate formed a free spiritual and moral space in the most unfree Soviet years — the Durylin house in Bolshevo became the center of attraction of the creative intelligentsia, the center of a large family connected by ties of spiritual kinship. The house performed both a residential function, and a museum, and a temple.