The image of Chichikov in modern Russian prose

The article considers the reception of Chichikov’s image in modern Russian prose of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. The reception of Chichikov’s image is considered in the complex of all the elements of the Chichikov plot: the topos of the road and the images-symbols of the “voznitsa”, the “brichka”, “ptitsa troyka”, the caskets, the alive and dead soul. Three groups of texts are taken for analysis. The first group is journalistic texts (B. Paramonov’s “Vozvrashchenie Chichikova” [The Return of Chichikov] (1991), A. Latynina’s “Patent na blagorodstvo”: vydast li ego literatura kapitalu? [Patent for nobility: will literature give it to the capital?] (1993), V. Pyetsukh’s “Russaki” [Russians] (2007), V. Elistratov’s “Chichikov i ipotechnoe kreditovanie: к metafizike finansovogo krizisa” [Chichikov and mortgage lending: on metaphysics of financial crisis] (2009)) which concentrate on the comprehension of the problem of demand of the Chichi-kov type in new Russian social and economic reality. In these texts, the reception of the image of Chichikov is connected with reflections about the coming of a new Chichikov reality in Russia, with its economy changing in the 1990s and with the arising new type of the “purchaser-swindler”. The second group is the artistic texts of the first post-perestroika decade (B. Kenzheyev’s Ivan Bezuglov, Meshchansky roman [Ivan Bezuglov. A Philistine Novel] (1993) and A. Utkin’s Samouchki [A Self-Learners] (1998)) which are the first attempts to understand the “real” time and its hero. In the context of these works, the author makes an attempt to comprehend businessmen of the modern era based on the allusions of Gogol’s character. The third group is the artistic texts of the first third of the 21st century, which are united, on the one hand, by the problem of the “hero of the time”, and by the significance of the text of Gogol’s poem in their semantic space, on the other hand (O. Slavnikova’s Bessmertnyy [The Immortal] (2001), Ya. Verov’s Gospodin Chichikov [Mr. Chichikov] (2012), A. Ivanov’s Bluda and MUDO (2011), V. Sharov’s Return to Egypt (2013)). These works are characterized by a general receptive model of Gogol’s character, which is related to the image of the trickster, its archetypal and modern characteristics. In the works of modern authors, the trickster gene in the image of Chichikov serves as the starting point for thinking about the heroes of the time through the opposition of a true and false prophet, a savior and tempter. Each of the modern authors actualizes their own levels of meanings in this opposition: ontological (O. Slavnikova), social and moral-ethical (Ya. Verov, A. Ivanov), historiosophical (V. Sharov). In general, the examined texts, based on the material of contemporary Russian reality, present an attempt to “peer” into the face of the “heroes of the time” and their entourage. This circumstance is due to the fact that Gogol’s character is important as a starting point in reflections about the cultural hero, the situation of the relativization of ontological, epistemological, ethical and many other orientations, not the need for moral-utopian projects for the nation.

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