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Abstract:

This article studies Gogol’s natural-scientific notes to address the relationship between the writer’s literary and scientific texts. A detailed commentary is offered on the “Tsaritsyn text” of Gogol’s summary of the book by P.S. Pallas “Travels through Different Provinces of the Russian Empire in 1768–1773”, which has not been examined by researchers up to now. Its role is traced in the composition of the second volume of “Dead Souls” and the book on Russian geography for young people, on which Gogol worked in the early 1850s. The scientific and aesthetic principles of the writer’s selection of materials and the stylistic reworking of the source text are analysed. It is argued that Gogol’s interest in the Tsaritsyn version of Pallas’s book may have led to the development in the second volume of the novel of the Chichikov plot about the relocation of purchased dead souls to the Volga Region rather than to Kherson Province. This change could have also reflected the reforms of the Minister of State Property P. Kiselev (1838–1841), which were accompanied by the mass resettlement of peasants to the “empty” Volga lands. The article’s commentary on Gogol’s summary suggests new intertextual connections between the writer’s scientific and artistic discourses.