V.A. Zhukovsky and A.V. Nikitenko on Raphael's Sistine Madonna: the typology of ekphrasis as a representative of aesthetic consciousness

The paper studies A.S. Pushkin's "The Undertaker", created in the Boldino Autumn of 1830 and included in The Belkin Tales. Turning to the creative history of the work, analyzing its content and the image of the central character, considering the problem of its reception, the authors of the paper come to a conclusion that the concept of the little house as the life-creating and miraculous component of its semiosphere is of special importance for its study. The representative meaning of this concept is inextricably linked with the history of its functioning in the creative consciousness of the poet. The special place and meaning in the dictionary of Pushkin's language of the symbolic spaces of "my penates", house and little house allows one to see the evolution of these words-concepts on the way to the concept of a little house that in the early 1830s acquired a special scale in the spiritual life of Pushkin. The mastering of this concept in the lyrics (the poems "Domovoy" [House Spirit], "Gorodok" [Little Town], "Poslanie k Yudinu" [The Epistle to Yudin], "Novosel'e" [Housewarming], "Vnov' ya pos-etil..." [Again I Visited . . .]) is inextricably linked with the problems of the poet's spiritual life, the formation of his philosophy of self-reliance. Entering the world of poetic novels ("The Lodge in Kolomna", "The Bronze Horseman") and prose (The Belkin Tales, Dubrovsky) sharpens interest in the substantial problems of life, matters of life and death. The world of the Russian province, the issues of daily existence, the image of a small man reveal the philosophical undertones of the concept of the little house. In this respect, the story "The Undertaker" in the context of Pushkin's work of the Boldino Autumn becomes a representative of this process. The story of the awakening of the Pushkin hero to life and the discovery of a new little house expands the spiritual space of Pushkin's prose. In the polemic around the story, the philosophical potential of Pushkin's concept of the little house and of the story "The Undertaker" is more clearly indicated. Appearing in the atmosphere of the birth of a new Russian prose, of reflections on the genre of the novel as a "form of time", The Belkin Tales revealed the historiosophical potential of Pushkin's prose. Simple matters of provincial life acquired an existential character, and the image of the "little man" was included in the process of national self-consciousness. An original response to Pushkin's quest was "Poteryannaya dlya sveta povest'" [A Story Lost for the Society] by O.I. Senkovsky, who disappeared under the name of A. Belkin. Its parodic meaning is obvious; it developed in other stories of the same author ("Turetskaya tsygaanka" [A Turkish Gypsy], "Dzhulio" [Giulio]), also signed by this pseudonym. The editor of Biblioteka dlya chyeniya parodies the insignificance of the content of The Belkin Tales, he tries to show the lack of characters in their characters. The article first analyzes the story "Domik na Nikitskoy" [A Little House in Nikitskaya Street] which appeared in the journal Teleskop under the cryptonym Z and, as the authors claim, is written by M.P. Pogodin. Its content is not only related to Pushkin's "The Undertaker", but also reveals the philosophical implication of the concept of the little house and the existential meaning of the character -the undertaker Adrian Prokhorov.

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