The image of Chichikov as an ontological mystery: the phenomenon of enigmatic character of the thanatology of Dead Souls by N.V. Gogol

On the eve of becoming a realistic paradigm that necessarily involves psychology, literature of the first half of the 19th century begins to assert the idea of the instability of forms and unreliability of the person. Gogol was behind the deadly issues in the national "high" literature of the 19th century, and in Dead Souls lethality frankly goes into eschatology. However, in Gogol's poem liminal subjects, which manifest themselves in the whole creative system of the writer, hide the ontological perspective. This issue is related to the complexity of multiple conventional views on the boundaries of the concept "I" and the essence of this category. Presentation of Chichikov at the beginning of Dead Souls already indicates that the character can not be combined into a stable, unified identity. Chichikov assimilates a variety of personalities and yet integrates his own subjectivity in the identity of each of his interlocutors. This ambivalence becomes a measure of the threat of the concept of personality. It sees the destruction of the "I", the rejection of oneself as the essential foundation of self-propagation possibility of the integral subjectivity of Gogol's character. When Chichikov acquires the features of other persons, and integrates his "I" in other people, he must expand his subjectivity, and hence increase his place in the world. The result should be a substitute for immortality. However, self-distribution does not lead to self-realization, because "the life of another person" suggests that the essence of the "I" resides not in the "I". The resolution of this paradox is due to finding an answer to the question: "What is Chichikov's reason to buy dead souls?". Chichikov wants to acquire the largest possible number of dead souls. He also verbally resurrects them. This action is similar to the character's self-identification with landlords. For Chichikov this intervention of others' subjectivities and bringing them to his own personality is the overcoming of death, the maximum distribution of his "I" and the world "to death", and in the space "after death". Thus, the power of the "ego" of Chichikov is aimed at gaining immortality; and the idea of overcoming death appears in Dead Souls in the ontological perspective, and takes the form of juxtaposition of life and death. An extremely acute question is about the awareness of the sublimation in the suggestion of Gogol's work, because it is too unorthodox. Indeed, Dead Souls is an administered threat to the religious outlook, according to which physical immortality is not possible, in contrast to the immortality of the soul. Of course, Gogol shared the Christian axiom, but the ambivalence of the world-making of the poem conflicts with the original views of the writer, his worldview and the pathos he intended to present in the text. It is these semiotic fluctuations that largely make Dead Souls an inexhaustible source of meanings and determine the inability of the final or, at least, unambiguous interpretation of Gogol's masterpiece.

Keywords

Authors

References