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 considers the conceptualization of the literary names of A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov and other Russian and foreign writers (I.S. Turgenev, L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov, Dante Alighieri, F. Nietzsche) as one of the variations of the “neo-mythological mode” in the representation of the “estate topos” in the prose work of G.I. Chulkov, the great symbolist writer of the Silver Age. First of all, it is shown that the “Pushkin — Lermontov” opposition correlates with the mythopoetic dichotomy of day and night, Sun and Moon, Apollo and Dionysus, epic and tragedy, common for the “younger” symbolism, being included in the neo-Romantic duality with its endless cycle of symbols. In addition, it is investigated how the “estate myth” of the Silver Age is discredited and destroyed with the help of Lermontov-Dionysian connotations. Russian “estate myth” of the Silver Age, as interpreted by G.I. Chulkov, goes back to the Apollonian sunshine of the Golden Age of Russian culture, marked by the name of Pushkin and his novel “Eugene Onegin”, in which the figures of the Silver Age saw the highest expression of Russian “estate culture”. The main attention is paid to the central work of the “estate text” by G.I. Chulkov — the story “House on the Sand” (1910–1911), an undeservedly forgotten masterpiece of Russian prose. The semiotics of the names of Pushkin and Lermontov in this work goes back to the works of his contemporaries V.V. Rozanov, V.S. Solovyov, D.S. Merezhkovsky, F. Sologub, A. Bely, A.A. Blok, which were significant for the author.