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Abstract:

The article is devoted to the work of Kokhanovskaya (N.S. Sokhanskaya), close to the Slavophile trend, and traces how throughout her literary path she turned to the theme of Russian history, always showing it through the prism of domestic and family history. The author highlights Kokhanovskaya’s special interest in the era of Catherine the Great, presented in her prose, primarily in the documentary chronicle “Starina”, i. e. “our Middle Ages”. The article examines in detail the only work where the empress is present not “behind the stage”, but as one of the characters, namely the story “Verbal Crumb of Bread” (1874) and indicates a number of parallels and obvious reminiscences, referring to the classic model, Pushkin’s story “The Captain’s Daughter”. In both works, the queen suddenly changes the fate of the main characters, being for them the personification of Providence.