N. V. Gogol

The article studies the history of N. V. Gogol and I. A. Krylov’s acquaintance in St. Petersburg. Based on a wide range of literary sources it is attempted to identify their relationship in 1830–1835.

The article examines the facts of Nikolai Gogol’s biography and his several works which shed the light on the author’s early acquaintance with Ivan Krylov’s works. The material from Dmitry Troschinsky’s library has been used for a detailed study for the first time. An epigraph to the fable The Eagle and the Bee for Gogol’s handwritten journal Meteor literatury (The meteor of literature) has been analyzed. It is assumed that Krylov’s oeuvre may have influenced the early Gogol.

The article considers one of the satellites of N. V. Gogol’s comedy The Government Inspector in which an important role is played by the phenomenon of the author’s cunning. All the phases and techniques of the author’s play are consistently revealed; they are aimed at offering the readers a new interpretation of the famous comedy.

The article considers texts accompanying the comedy «The Inspector General». The researcher traces the changes of the author’s assessment of his own texts, the author’s doubts and self-reflection.

Stylistic function of the motives of hearsay and fame are studied in the plots of «Old-World Landowners», «Viy», and «The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich» by N. V. Gogol. Their role in the plot and the chronotopos of the works is considered, as well as their meaning in the space of the stories, their linkages with the motives of emergency and disclosed mystery are regarded.

The article investigates strange transformations which occur to the categories of time and space in the story “Nevsky Prospekt”. An attempt is undertaken to explain the concentration of these metamorphoses on the stylistic level of the story and to confirm the psychic nature of the strange as a certain world lookout ingrained in the subject’s consciousness.

The article studies the problem of Petersburg text of the Russian literature in the literary works by Konstantin Vaginov, its correspondence to the classical Petersburg text of A. Pushkin, F. Dostoevsky, N. Gogol.