Romanticism Dissimilation in the Gogol’s Short Story “The Carriage”
Elena Vranchan
The article focuses on the plot story of the characters in the Gogol’s short story “The Carriage” in the context of the author's post-romantic literary reflection. In this regard, the rhetorical device such as giving the horse character a female name refers to romantic female images and allows considering the plot story of the character as a history of the character dissimilation in the style of romantic irony.
This way of applying a rhetorical device reflects different elements: folklore, sentimental-romantic, naturalistic, which is due to the change of literary paradigms in the first half of the XIX century – the time of aesthetic emergence of Natural School and Russian Realism. It is assumed that this was manifested in Gogol's way of depicting a thing when the image of the carriage is comprehended as the objective embodiment of the image of the hero. At the same time, the carriage, and the mount are interpreted in the plot space of the story “Carriage” as elements of everyday culture, and as elements of aesthetic reality. The way they are portrayed reflects the archaic nature, referring to the folklore of the peoples of the Caucasus; stylistic tendencies of the parodic “journey of imagination”, referring to the imaginary travels of a trickster; romantic tendencies of anthropomorphism of an animal, referring to the Byronic type of “Southern Beauty”. These stylistic trends are reflected not only in the artistic world of Gogol, but also in the works of A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, P. Vyazemsky, A. Pushkin, and M. Lermontov. Taking this into account, we can conclude that Gogol, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, sought to post-romantic “everydayness” of the character's image not only through fiction-based detailing, but also through idiomatic rhetorical techniques.