The ghost motive in the novel «Lady Macbeth from Mtsensk district» by N.S. Leskov

The purpose of this article is to understand the function of the ghost motif in the plot of the text, to createimages of the characters and narrative structure of one of Leskovs early novels, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Here, the motif of aghost writer was first used by the writer, ensuring its further active use. Despite the lack of the authors assessment of the nature of thephenomenon in this novel, and in other works by Leskov unique, despite the frontier character of such categories as ghost, dream, hallucination,we can still determine Leskovs concept of ghost as a phenomenon of a human or animal, not a given object, different fromthe Russian folklore equivalents of ghosts (zombies, vampires) with emphasis on the other world materiality. On the contrary, it is theawareness of the immateriality of the ghost image that largely determines the internal development of the protagonist of the story. Ourunderstanding of the motif is close to the definition of A.N. Veselovsky, who considered motif as a kind of a sense bearing unit, morphologicallydecomposable into the unchanging and changing parts. The semantic core of the ghost motif in Leskovs works, includingLady Macbeth of Mtsensk, in our opinion, is the situation of the person meeting the spirit of the dead, which appears in the form ofan animal, half-human and half-animal, and human, able to move and speak, emerging out of nowhere and disappearing to nowhere. Theperipheral, changing part of the motif is the way the ghost appears, the identity of the dead, the reason of coming, etc. The proposedinterpretation of the core of the motifs is thought to be connected with the type of consciousness of the characters, including the imageof the narrator. In particular, it is their idea of the inner essence of the person who continues his postmortal being near the scene of hisdeath, especially the violent one. The motif is known to be an integral part of the plot and it can become a plot itself (cf. with A. Boehm,who calls the plot a complicated motif, which we see in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk). The plot-forming potential of the motif in thisnovel allows dividing it into stages (characters action → ghost appearance → change in the consciousness of the character), and identifyingthe accompanying motifs. As a result of the analysis of the story the author of this article concludes that the ghost motif is veryimportant for the novels ideological, thematic and motive complex. It defines the plot structure and interpretation of its semantics, actsas a mirror of the protagonists inner life, causes her internal development, functions as psychological analysis, builds the system ofcharacters in the story, and distinguishes the voices of characters, the narrator and author.

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