ON LITIGATION CONCERNING “LITIGATION”: THE PROBLEMS OF DATING ONE EPISODE OF GOGOL’S BIOGRAPHY
Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 2
Abstract
This article focuses on the problems around the exact dating of the final edition of Gogol’s play The Letigation read aloud by the author in house of Aksakov on his first return to Russia from abroad (1839–1840). Gogol’s reading is famous for a peculiar hoax: the author did not declare his intention to read the piece, so the listeners took hiccups of his fictional character for his own. Many remembered the incident but the notes of the memorialists on the date of the incident diverge. S.T. Aksakov mentions March 8, 1840 and I.I. Panaev — Summer of 1839. As the episode has not been hitherto dated, Gogol commentators put forward various conjectures about who of the memorialists made a mistake. Besides using all available biographical, epistolary, and memoir data for the analysis of this discrepancy, the author of the paper turns to the results of the textological research of Litigation and typological comparison of Aksakov’s and Panaev’s memoirs. Both had different goals and generic intentions and thereby we observe a different balance between facts and fiction in the memoirs of each. Aksakov made chronological records of his communication with Gogol that were too premature to publish. Panaev wrote for the upcoming issues of the journal Contemporary and was concerned with entertaining his audience. Analysis of the entire complex of existing data allows date Gogol’s hoax and, consequently, the final edition of the play by March 1840.
Authors and Affiliations
Е. G. Paderina
Keywords
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- EP ID EP26157
- DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-2-290-315
- Views 286
- Downloads 16
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