About the author:
Olga A. Bogdanova, DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, Department of Russian Literature of the Late 19th – Early 20th Centuries, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7004-498X
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Abstract:
Events in the novel Roman-Tsarevich by Z.N. Gippius are set in the 1910s on the territory of country estates in different parts of Russia, as well as in a Western European castle-dacha near the Pyrenees, where Russian revolutionaries live in exile. The discovery of Gippius is that in the field of “estate topos” she found a meaning that goes back to the activities of the Decembrists — noble revolutionaries of the first quarter of the 19th century, often large landlords. The “estate topos” appears in Roman-Tsarevich as the topos of the Russian religious revolution in a number of local variations. The ideological and artistic circulation between its three loci unites the Western European castle, reminiscent of the Enlightenment’s roots of the Russian “estate culture” with its ideal of free personality, a noble mansion of the Golden Age, which brings Russia’s first apostles of religious revolution (S.I. Muraviev-Apostol, etc.), and eclectical intellectual-landowner’s estate house of the Silver Age, which inhabitants are under the evil power of the Antichrist from the revolution. At the same time, they retain the ability to break the fatal circle due to a heterotopic connection with the other two estate projections presented in the novel.