Dead Souls by N. Gogol and Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by H. Melville: forms of epication in ontological realism

Reference to the epic during reorganization of the novel becomes particularly topical in the 1830s and 1840s. The novel gravitates to the epic aiming to bring historical coordinates of life to the universal (ontological) experience. A novel of the new time assumes the problem of recreation of the epic unity and universality with the help of a more complicated set of tools, overstepping the limits of the novel itself as well as the traditional epic. A typological comparison of the epic works by H. Melville and N.V. Gogol seems especially productive. Both authors use a substratum of the archaic (mythopoeia) as well as a wide spectrum of cultural languages and styles as an expression of "the large memory of culture". The claims of a text in existence and humanity are universalized, the existing (historical) is revised. The texts come out to the universal order and translate it, they reconstruct ontology (nature, existential forces, etc.) and actualize substantiality and corporeality as forms of wholeness and authenticity. Philosophical fiction, on the typological base of which Moby-Dick and Dead Souls are compared, represents not only the world reflection but also sefl-reflection of literature with most complete usage of its genres in their ontological potential (not only in the generally aesthetic one) for the symphony of the philosophical world view. "Ontological realism", with its priority of existence over the objective and metaphysical realities, assumes that an artistic image focuses on the objective given; at the same time, the image of the reality includes images of conceptions of this reality organized via its shapes in their specific artistic representation. The phenomenon of the artistic world allows to correlate these types of world images in different ways; as a result, non-representable essence of being reveals itself, located only in relation or at a tangent to the image of reality, to the metaphysical area or to the image system of the work itself. The system of characters is formed as a special entirety reflecting the entirety of a nation or even humanity. The image of a character includes some archetypes determining its tendency to a supertype (the article accentuates the archetypes of the Tsar and Job as specific correlations of existence).The conflict between a human being and the world with its suprapersonal powers has an external nature by Melville and an internal nature by Gogol. This is accentuated not only by discussions of the characters or the narrator but also by the metaphorical elements of a character's image mostly connected with their ontological subordination. The image of a character becomes a correlate of the life-substantial levels through the modality of its own metaphorical plan. The American novel and Dead Souls are drawn together with the subject of a "hollow sense" of the world-sign (for Melville this is the white whale, for Gogol this is the "soul" as a form of the unity of a human and existence, the unity of life and death). This main image is filled with various spectra of sign and substantial correlations of a human and the world (in the aspect of agnosticism and stoicism, relativity and modality of moving to the noumenal through the phenomenal) as autonomous and conflicting values in the empirical reality. This idea corresponds to the main storyline - the way to a new birth through death.

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