On the Demarcation Between Attitude and Poetics (On the Example of Marriage by Nikolai Gogol)

Gogol’s works are very promising for the demarcation between the author’s attitude and the text’s idea and poetics that, usually, successively generate one another. However, Gogol’s attitude came from the archaic and normally could not become the text’s idea - including the motif of a marriage threat. In Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Viy, this motif was part of the depicted folklore world and, thanks to it, was detached from the author. The motif spawns new ties between attitude, idea, and poetics in the comedy Marriage (1833, 1842). Here idea (satire on marriage-related estate swagger) is formally given, and so the motif of marriage threat (shown in Podkolesin’s indecision) goes beyond it and approves itself by contradiction. Kochkarev shows unconsciously in his praise of women the infinity of their bodies as the archaic background of Podkolesin’s attraction to and fear of marriage. This infinity comes from the Slavic belief that during menses the female body ties the people’s world with the underground world of the dead and the infinity of the Earth. The kinship between the woman and the animal, which is constantly voiced in the comedy, makes marriage shameful and transforms its diabolic symbolism into “devil’s laughter”. Placing the story of the failed marriage in the “non-Russian” Petersburg world (perceived by the Russian folk mind as a realized chimera), Gogol gives the hidden explanation of his fear of women personified in Podkolesin. At the very beginning of the comedy, the invasion of the real world by the chimeric one is manifested in “new mirrors” that show people their caricatures. The character’s obscene language is the sign of his high position in society (it is legitimated by the “sodomic” names); lies become an unconscious replacement of the truth, and the hyperbole approves the opposite. Zhevakin and Kochkarev reflect the succession of the archaic and laughter worlds in Marriage. The former represents the “alive deceased” and an old-Russian beggar; the latter a joker and a devil-matchmaker. The explicit and banal “idea” in Marriage is the starting point for the poetical expression of Gogol’s attitude. However, personifying it in the comical hero, who lives in a comical world, Gogol, like in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Viy (though in a different way), distanced himself from this attitude. Gogol’s late works show his own and hard-fought ideas. The archaic attitude was a fatal threat for them. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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