«Boots squared»: shoe story in Russian literature of the 1840-1870s

The paper discusses the formation of a thematic plot with such an identification marker as a pair of boots. The basis for identifying this conventional plot is the frequency of the subject detail: from the 1840s boots appear not only as a consumer reality involved in the characterology of the hero, but are also an important part of the plot level forming a specific type of event. The «boots» plot is considered on the basis of the works by Dostoyevsky, by writers of the naturalistic school. In the framework of this school the said plot develops, in particular, due to numerous literary connections with “boot” allusions to Pushkin and Gogol, into a kind of meta-plot. The paper retraces the dynamics of the plots in the «raznochinskaya» literature and the democratic criticism of the 1860-1870s, where boots change their bureaucratic wearers of noble birth for bureaucrats of plebeian descent and become sui generis a symbol of a new hero-commoner (raznochinets). Remaining within the cliché, they symbolize both the status of new writers and workers, and that of the new democratic literature. The semantics and pragmatics of the plot under consideration makes it possible to conclude that the «boots» plot is not only the plot of the Russian literature. It is also the story of the Russian literature.

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