Space-time coordinates in Gore ot Uma by A.S. Griboyedov and its German translation by Louis Schneider

The comedy Gore ot Uma was planned and written after the War of 1812, the time of formation and rise of the Decembrist movement and active collision of the new and the past. The contraposition of the new to the past was the basis of the comedy and it is not only a matter of the conflict but a way to contrast and identify the views of the characters. Two ages, the new age, dreaming of the future, and the past age, constantly referring to the old times, define the antithesis of one’s own and stranger’s spaces, internal and external, of order and incident, reality and dream, living and dead, of light and darkness , intelligence and stupidity, etc. Space-time coordinates of Gore ot Uma define the meaning of such lexical items as dom (home), semya (family), rod (kin), svoy (own), chuzhoy (alien), gost' (guest), vek (century), kalendar' (calendar), vremya (time) etc. It also reveals the antithesis of natural time and artificial one. The very remaining confrontation of the old and new capitals - Moscow and St. Petersburg - has derived from the comedy as well. Famusov’s house mythologem is not only a locus in quo but also the leading character in some way. It is not only a particular building or home, but also a symbol of sedentary life, chores, family ties, etc., but also an image of a bigger house - Moscow, an extended family circle, a circle of people, of men of the cast. Gore ot Uma presents an image of the time, consisting not only of historical and social characteristics, but also of its subjective figurative perception by the characters: slow-motion time characterizes the world of Famusov and rapid one determines Chatsky’s. It is notable, that the natural stream of life is replaced in the house of Famusov with a cycle, which is determined by a clock (which he significantly sets in Act 1) and a calendar (which defines continuous domestic events like births or deaths of known people). The image of Moscow in the comedy is both definite and indefinite as it is a model of a house, a city, and a world. The very concept of dom is nuclear to Russian linguistic consciousness, it defines inner space occupied by a human surrounded by chaos. It is the first human’s universe which gathers all human’s memory, dreams and thus links the times. Thus, different spaces and times distinguish differences in characters’ outlooks, minds and represent the comedy’s dramatic conflict. If translators of the comedy fail to render this complex space-time antithesis, it leads to substantial losses of meaning. Comparison with German translation Kummer durch Verstand by Louis Schneider, 1831 clearly identifies conceptual and artistic richness of the original as well as Russian linguistic world-image.

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