About the authors:
Maria V. Mikhailova, DSc in Philology, Honored Professor, 1) Professor of the Department of the History of Modern Russian Literature and Modern Literary Process of Philological Faculty, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie gory 1/51, 119991 Moscow, Russia; Leading Research Fellow, 2) A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8193-6588
E-mail:
Anastasia V. Nazarova, PhD in Philology, Senior Lecturer, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory, 1, building 51, 119991 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3579-861X
E-mail:
Abstract:
The article analyzes the peculiarity of the “estate topos” in the prerevolutionary and emigrant works of E.N. Chirikov. A comparison of his prose and drama with the previous literary tradition shows the estate brings out a fundamentally different function in Chirikov’s creativity. In the literature of the 19th century estate was depicted as a place where a person can find peace of mind and calming down (I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov, etc.), or, on the contrary, as a space that has a corrupting effect on owners and servants (N.V. Gogol, N.A. Nekrasov, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin). Chirikov’s contemporaries — writers of the Silver Age (A.P. Chekhov, I.A. Bunin, A.N. Tolstoy, etc.) were characterized by a synthesis of “idealizing” and “critical” views on the role of the estate in the Russian history and culture. However, in Chirikov’s novels and “social dramas”, the space of the estate house and garden becomes an arena of confrontation between various social groups, primarily the noble liberal-democratic intelligentsia and the masses of the people. Chirikov is showing that this conflict is based on the struggle for the land, which is used as a bait for the people by the owners of the estates, who play calculatingly on the centuries-old peasant dreams of land redistribution. So according to writer’s point of view deception and provocation led to the revolutionary explosion of 1917, which eventually destroyed all the “noble nests”.