The image of the Caliph in the historical sketch "Al-Ma'mun" by N.V Gogol

This article examines the image of the Arab Caliph Al-Ma'mun presented in Gogol's historical sketch from his collection the Arabesques (1835). The necessity of a deeper understanding of the topic "Gogol and Orientalism" is proved. In this article, Orientalism is a style of thinking based on the mythological distinction between East and West (according to E. Said), design of mythological characters and spaces in the context of the colonial discourse in Western Europe and Russia of the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries. The problem of "Gogol and Orientalism" is considered in the context of philosophy and poetics of Gogol's fundamental creative category "vsemir" ("whole world"). The story of Al-Ma'mun served a variety of tasks for Gogol's self-presentation forming the image of a writer and scientist who has encyclopedic knowledge and knows how to analyze the problems of contemporary culture excitingly and thoughtfully on the exotic material. A vivid image of the Arabian Caliph-reformer was not an evidence of Gogol's systemic interest to historical figures, because it only appeared when addressing someone: Pushkin as a historian and writer of Peter's and Catherine's times and Zhukovsky as the educator of the heir to the Russian throne. Moreover, the image of Al-Ma'mun was convenient for Gogol because it was at the intersection of Pushkin's and Zhukovsky's historical and oriental interests in the 1830s. It is useful to distinguish two components in the structure of Al-Ma'mun's image: history and Art. The historical component is associated with the description of the personality of an Oriental despot: which historical facts available to Gogol were selected for creating the image of the Arab Caliph, which were ignored; what historical concept lies at the basis of this image; whether Gogol is accurate and independent in interpreting the role of Al-Ma'mun in the history of the Caliphate. The artistic component is associated with the formation of the personal Gogol's myth of Al-Ma'mun: what literary tradition the image of the Caliph is written in; what philosophical and aesthetic notions define its artistic integrity and the harmony in the structure of the Arabesques. The artistic component of the image of Al-Ma'mun can be disclosed in the projection on the literary tradition of the late 18th - first half of the 19th centuries. To disclose the philosophical and aesthetic content of Al-Ma'mun's image, it is more productive to consider it in the context of the English Gothic novel, in particular, in connection with the paradigm of William Beckford's Vathek.

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