Hronotop prazdnika v metasûžete Gogolâ

The importance of folk holidays, which determine the belonging of Gogol’s work to the traditions of laughter carnival culture, was substantiated by M. Bakhtin in his article Rabelais and Gogol. The scientist interpreted Gogol’s festive chronotopes as a time of unregulated fun, a space of absolute freedom. Modern folklore and ethnographic research has revealed a more complex emotional and structural nature of the folk festival, in which laughter is inseparable from the fear of “people returning from the afterlife”, abundantly represented in Gogol’s prose. The article, in contrast to the concept of M. Bakhtin, focuses on this aspect of Gogol’s chronotope, traces its close connection with the rites of remembrance of the dead, actualizing the central ontological problem of the writer’s creativity – alive and dead soul. The permeability of the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead in the Evenings, Mirgorod, the first volume of Dead Souls, is due to the dominance of the Christmas chronotope and its calendar modifications. In the second volume of Dead Souls, the Easter chronotope of spring folk holidays, associated with the spiritual awakening of its heroes under the influence of love, comes to the fore. In terms of the popular Christian calendar, Gogol’s metaplot can be interpreted and described as a transition from Svyatki / Christmas to Radunitsa / Easter.