Three ensembles by A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol and V.F. Odoevsky: The Asylum, The Arabesques, The Contemporary

The unfulfilled project of a literary miscellany Trojchatka can be considered one of the most difficult and mysterious projects in the history of Pushkin's epoch culture. In this miscellany, planned as a "section of a three storey house with different scenes on each storey", the writers wanted to combine a story by Rudyj Panek about the "attic", a story by Irinej Gomozejko about the "reception- room", and a story by Ivan Petrovich Belkin about the "basement", the lower part of the house. This project had not been fulfilled but Trojchatka existed as a cultural phenomenon though not as a miscellany but as a special meta-text combination of different forms making some special area of a creative dialogue of the writers who defined the course of literary development in the 1830s: at the level of motive, thematic, genre exchanges, and also at the level of understanding the philosophy of art, the role of a writer, and the principles of the influence of literature on the reader. The phenomenon of Trojchatka implemented one of the most striking "ideas of the age" of the 1830s: the idea of a synthetic perception and description of existence in fiction. This tendency to the synthesis was fulfilled in the picture of creative evolution of each of the Trojchatka authors from genre-thematic collections to complex synthetic journals including not only fiction stories but also critical and analytical essays. Gogol's Arabesques and the conception of The Asylum, which was later included in The Russian Nights by Odoevsky, can be considered important steps of the Russian literature's advance on its way to the synthetic comprehension of the reality. Pushkin's journal The Contemporary could be called the summary of this evolution and peculiar implementation of the source idea of Trojchatka; in this area the origin of "the three-stored house" developed into a complex interaction of the authors on a new basis. On the one hand, every writer partly keeps his narration principles when forming his own text in the general journal structure, the principles used in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, The Belkin Tales, Mixed Fairy Tales : first of all, this is about the author's position, his typical mask specifying the semantic key to the story understanding. On the other hand, the writers refuse the direct usage of the masks thus widening the area of perception of their fictions and critical articles. In that way, the original idea of Trojchatka gets a more scaled realization becoming not only the vice blamer of the modern society on its different "storeys" but also offering a complex comprehension of the laws of existence, historical development of the human society, and the principles of self-dependency of a human in being.

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