A “Siberian patriot” in the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Nikolai Yadrintsev and the regional literary canon

The article analyzes Nikolai Yadrintsev's reception of the literary tradition of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the influence of the House of the Dead (1861-1862) on the Russian Community in Prison and Exile (1872). The creative dialogue between the centralist and the Siberian patriot has already come to the attention of literary critics. S. Frank considered the opposite views of Yadrintsev and Dostoevsky on Siberia, hard labor, and convicts. This study reveals points of contact and points of difference of the above-mentioned works at the level of methods of depicting space (categories of the living-dead), figurative structure (the focus is on “prison residents” - the warden, zhigan, etc.), the narrative strategy of the two writers who survived imprisonment in the same prison (Dostoevsky has a frame composition, Yadrintsev has an alternation of fictional fragments with the hero-narrator and parts that are a study of penitentiary systems), and stylistic features. The way both writers use typing when creating scenes and characters is analyzed, as well as a number of cultural allusions, with the help of which Yadrintsev appeals to the reader's memory and the reader's horizons. The analysis of the books of the great writer and his younger contemporary led not only to interest in Yadrintsev's epistolary heritage (letters of the 1870s to Grigory Potanin), but also an appeal to the works of a number of scholars. Yadrintsev's creative path is considered within the framework of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social fields. For a correct understanding of the specifics of the perception and use of literature by the Siberian writer, which half a century later will be called classical, the works of researchers who studied the mechanisms of the formation of the literary canon (H. Bloom, M. Yampolsky, B. Dubin, I. Kaspe, M. Gronas, A. Lanu) are involved. The works by Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman were used for solving the genre problem (first attempt at a novel) of the House of the Dead and the Russian Community in Prison and Exile. The creative path of the Siberian patriot is also considered from the point of view of regional aesthetics, the postulates of which were finally formulated by Potanin in the article “The novel and the story in Siberia” (1876). The focus is on Yadrintsev's use of the existing literary experience, his attempt to auto-legitimize in the field of Russian literature of the 19th century and form an own regional canon.

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