A. E. Eremeev
nou_ogu@mail.ru
Omsk Humanitarian Academy, Omsk, Russian Federation
The Biblical myth role in the formation of the moral and philosophical searches of the early N. V. Gogol (“Terrible Revenge”)
Abstract: Starting from his early creative work, N. V. Gogol consistently developed the doctrine of the spiritual principle, the unity of a human’s responsibility to life and its moral foundations. The author’s religious and moral issues were developed during the creation of the first prose collection “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”; this idea can be proved by the analysis of one of the stories included in the collection – “Terrible Revenge” – undertaken in the following article. In the story, Gogol develops a special type of philosophizing peculiar to his self-consciousness, characterized not by strict logic and theoretical constructions, but expressed in a reverent attitude to life in its spiritual understanding. The philosophical projection of Gogol’s narration is created due to the semantic conjugation of two-time planes – the past and the present; a myth becomes the point of conjugation, the creation of the multidimensionality of spiritual comprehension. The article comprehends the artistic functions of the parabola and its role in the organization of the stylistic harmony in the story “Terrible Revenge”, which makes it possible to understand the phenomenon of philosophical generalization played a key role in the story composition construction and in the disclosure of its moral and aesthetic integrity. The undertaken research is based on the holistic analysis, which allows us to see the conjugation of the religious and aesthetic dominants of the author’s consciousness and the system of images-symbols in the inseparable artistic unity of Gogol’s story “The Terrible Revenge”. The analysis of the mythopoetics of the story reveals how, with the help of the parabola form developed in ancient literature, a certain type of philosophical generalization characteristic of Russian philosophical prose is created in the plot- compositional cohesion of Gogol’s work.
Keywords: Bible, Gogol, the Terrible Revenge, myth, mythopoetics, parabola, parable, type of philosophical generalization, moral and philosophical search, religious and aesthetic position, Russian philosophical prose.
Paper submitted: March 27, 2023.
For citation: Eremeev A. E. (2023) The Biblical myth role in the formation of the moral and philosophical searches of the early N. V. Gogol (“Terrible Revenge”). Russian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 7–31. DOI: 10.57015/issn1998-5320.2023.17.2.1.
