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:
The article examines the metamorphoses of the image of St. Petersburg created in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky, in the literature of the Silver age, in particular in the half-forgotten, but significant story of a major symbolist writer G.I. Chulkov “Autumn mists” (1916). It is shown that, on the one hand, Chulkov’s artistic experience is intertwined with the general trend of “rewriting the classics” for the Silver age, which was first noted by D.M. Magomedova, at the same time on the other — proved that “Autumn mists”, is primarily focused not on the “great five books” of Dostoevsky with the hero-ideologist in the center of each piece, and the synthetic image of St. Petersburg in the novel “Humiliated and offended” (1861), incorporates the positive connotations early works of the famous classics and accusatory — late, are the most complete polemical conclusion cultural dialogue with Dostoevsky at the end of the “Petersburg period” of Russian history. It is pointed out that Dostoevsky’s mythologized images were transformed into elements of symbolist and, more broadly, modernist poetics, as well as the rejection of psychologism and the reinterpretation of the writer’s historiosophical prophecies of the 19th century. Thus, “Autumn mists” is a restored link of the “Petersburg text” of Russian literature at the break of cultural and historical epochs, which, in the context of famous works on the same subject by I.F. Annensky, D.S. Merezhkovsky, A. Bely, A.A. Blok, and others of Chulkov’s contemporaries, has an indisputable value due to the many-sided meanings contained in it.