Reception of N.V. Gogol's Dead Souls in France: between the two world wars of the 20th century

There is no way to understand the specificity of the literary relationship between Russia and the West without perceiving the role of Gogol's work in a wide intercultural dialogue. This paper aims to reveal the particularities of the French reception of Gogol's key work, Dead Souls, in the period between two outstanding historical events. The starting point of the paper is the review of the results of the poem's reception (in a wide context) in France for the previous epoch. The reception period under examination starts with the emergence of two new French translations of the poem by Marc Semenoff and Henri Mongault. Having appeared almost simultaneously - if compared to the more than the sixty years' distance from the previous translation - they signalize the end of the era of the translations by Jean-Eugene Moreau and Ernest Charriere, which deeply corrupted Gogol's work and which most critical and literary reviews were based on. The growth of the Russian emigration conditioned by the historical context eventually leads to its playing a key role in the penetration of Dead Souls into the French cultural space. Except M. Semenoff it was Nikolai Brian-Chaninov, M. Chandibine, Modest Hofmann, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Konstantin Mochulsky, Vladimir Pozner, Aleksei Remizov, Boris de Schloezer who deepened the comprehension of Gogol's text, supplying (in some cases) the French reader with its new interpretations. The new first of all consisted in the analysis of the poem from the symbolists' point of view with the use of Bergson's and Freud's ideas (Schloezer). At the end of the period another perspective for the poem's study started looming in France (thanks to D. Merezhkovsky and N. Brian-Chaninov) - through the prism of the Gogolian mysticism. The "purely" French contribution which significantly influenced the assimilation of Gogol's work in France in those years is limited to two personalities: H. Mongault and Jules Legras. The former is highlighted, first and foremost - but not only - because of his high-quality translation of Dead Souls; his commentaries on the poem are of significant importance, too. The latter managed to come out with a well-rounded original approach to the perception of Gogol and his poem. J. Legras' lectures in this sense were the most substantial work in France since Eugene-Melchior de Vogue's times. But, generally, French critical reviews related to the subject of the study continued to be fragmentary and superficial; their quantity also remained wanting.

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