Gogol's text" in the novel Pismovnik by Mikhail Shishkin

The focus of the article is on the novel Pismovnik by the contemporary Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin, which was first published in 2012. On the one hand, the novel is a novel in letters which reflect the story of two lovers, Volodya and Sasha, and, on the other hand, it is a novel about the artist and the essence of literary art. The content of the novel, associated with reflections on the essence of creativity and the stages of the creative method of the artist-hero in the novel, has a broad intertextual field. A special place in the intertextual field of the novel, which has a distinct philosophical and aesthetic overtone, belongs to the figure of Gogol. For Shishkin, the classic of Russian literature is not a role model and unquestioned authority, but a reference point for the reflections on art and ways of its image in the contemporary literary context. Gogol's echo appears in two motive and thematic complexes of writing and vision that actualize the philosophical and aesthetic problems in the novel. On the one hand, Shishkin includes Gogol's view on writing which makes it possible to identify the metaphysical basis of reality in his aesthetic reflection space. The interest in this aspect of creativity determines the typology of Shishkin's hero in the novel, the homo scribens, which has a gene of Gogol. Shishkin's hero in his development as an artist goes from a blind passion for writing and words to the perception of a possibility to "lead" the world to beauty and harmony through writing. On the other hand, Gogol's philosophy of vision, including reflections on the ability to perceive both visible and invisible worlds, turns out to be significant for Shishkin. Shishkin's reflections give special interpretation to Gogol's motive of dead eyes, which becomes a symbol of the artist's interest in the sphere of nothingness, in the space of death, inaccessible to the perception of a living person. The mystery of death not only in everyday life, associated with personal fears, but also on the ontological level, related to the theme of art, occupies an important place in the semantic space of the image of the hero. By combining the two directions of Gogol's aesthetic reflection, writing and vision, Shishkin in his Pis-movnik primarily seeks creative self-determination. The need of creative self-determination is connected with the existence of Shishkin's individual artistic method in the gap between the classical and post-classical art traditions. Shishkin, bypassing Gogol's dramatic reflection on the essence of creativity in the ethical and anthropological, moral and aesthetic aspects, connected with the need to "hold the frontiers of knowledge" in art, reveals the plasticity and even blur of the boundaries between being and nothingness in verbal creativity through his original narrative poetics.

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