Philosophical implications of the little house concept in A.S. Pushkin's The Undertaker

The article describes A.S. Pushkin's The Undertaker, written in the Boldino autumn of 1830 and included in the series Tales of Belkin. The authors of the article turn to the creative history of the story, analyze its content and the image of the central character, consider the problem of the story reception and come to a conclusion that the little house concept is of special significance for the study of The Undertaker as a life-creating and world modeling component of its semiosphere. The representative meaning of this concept is inextricably linked with the history of its functioning in the creative mind of the poet. The symbolic spaces of "my Penates", the house and the little house have a special place and meaning in the Dictionary of Pushkin's Language and show the evolution of these word-concepts on the way to the concept of the little house, which in the early 1830s finds a special role in the spiritual life of Pushkin. The development of this concept in the lyrics (poems "Domovoy", "Gorodok", "Poslanie k Yudinu", "Novosel'e", "Vnov' ya posetil...") is inextricably linked with the problems of the spiritual life of the poet, the formation of his philosophy of independence. Entering the world of poetic novels (The Little House in Kolomna, The Bronze Horseman) and prose (Tales of Belkin, Du-brovsky) intensifies the interest in the substantial problems of existence, life and death. The world of Russian province, matters of daily life, the image of the little man reveal philosophical implications of the little house concept. In this respect, The Undertaker, in the context of Pushkin's Boldino works, becomes a representative of this process. The history of the awakening of Pushkin's hero to life and finding a new little house spreads the spiritual space of Pushkin's prose. The controversy surrounding the story clearly indicates the philosophical potential of Pushkin's little house concept and of The Undertaker. Tales of Belkin appeared during the formation of the new Russian prose, thoughts about the genre of the novel as a "form of time". The Tales revealed the histo-riosophical potential of Pushkin's prose. Simple matters of provincial life acquired existential character, and the image of the little man enters the process of national self-identification. A kind of response to Pushkin's search was O.I. Senkovsky's Tale Lost for the Soceity, signed by the name of A. Belkin. Its parodic sense is obvious, it was later developed in other works by the same author (A Turkish Gypsy, Julio), also signed by the pseudonym. The editor of Library for Reading parodies the low content of Tales of Belkin and tries to show the lack of character in their heroes. The paper first analyzes the story A Little House in Nikitskaya which appeared in the journal Telescope signed by a cryptonym Z and, as the authors argue, was written by M.P. Pogodin. Its content is not only associated with Pushkin's The Undertaker, but also reveals the philosophical subtext of the little house concept and existential meaning of the hero, undertaker Adrian Prokhorov.

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