Imagology of the home space and its liminal elements in the context of the miragy intrigue of Nikolai Gogol's comedy The Inspector General

The article analyses Gogol's poetics, which determines the change in the value of the home space and its transformation into a metaphorical mask of negative anthropology. This poetics is represented in the "composite city" of The Inspector General; on the one hand, it is a model of a social organisation, on the other, a "heartwarming city", where the structure of social relations is declared in spiritual and psychological generalisations, in the characters' passions. This image is expressed by means of drama that uses discrete loci. In the comedy, they are the house of the mayor and a room in the hotel. Initially, the community of city officials is a clan and elite structure: their circle is limited, outsiders are not allowed into it, everyone has a share of power, and interpersonal relations are close to familylike familiarity. It is implied that the doors are closed here, and the discussion of "the most unpleasant news" is private. The second locus of the play ("a small room in the hotel") is a completely different communicative space, where the insolvent loser Khlestakov is deprived of the right to control the borders. But for officials blinded by fear, the dark and damp room under the stairs illuminated by the fictitious status of the guest turns into a sacral space, the limits of which must be crossed with trepidation. This struggle for space, for maintaining control over it, and subsequently for its expansion continues throughout the play. Semantics of a threshold, embodied in the functions of the door and the window, made it possible in the play to unfold the plot of the social structuring of a closed and close, conditional and mirageously changeable space devoid of an ontological basis. The essence of the person in the "composite house" of the mayor determines the nearness to or farness from the source of power, the openness or closeness of the channels of penetration into it (doors and windows).

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