Nikolai Gogol’s The Old-World Landlords: The literary text as a fact of the literary process

Abstract

The article is an attempt to understand the approach to the interpretation of the literary text as a fact of the literary process, which is characteristic of the works of Vladimir M. Markovich and has become one of the methodological principles of his “Classics and Avant-garde” seminar. The material for such theoretical reflection was a specific historical and literary example: an analysis of Nikolai Gogol’s story The Old-World Landlords. Regarding the text as a fact of the literary process implies two conditions: firstly, setting the description of the artistic structure and, secondly, the historicity of such a description. It is the hermeneutic approach that allows to сombine these two aspects. The analysis of Gogol’s story, undertaken in the article, includes, on the one hand, a description of its narrative organisation and communicative strategies and, on the other hand, interpretation of real readers’ reactions in their historical conditioning. The result of such an analysis, which has its basis in hermeneutically-oriented historical poetics, cannot be a certain academic interpretation that claims a finite objectivity and inscribes the text into any historical or literary context (for example, the schemes of academic literary criticism that have been repeatedly deconstructed, or structuralist typologies). Its goal and only possible outcome are the explication of the moving and essentially nonclosed semantic perspective of the text.