N. V. GOGOL’S INFLUENCE ON V. V. KORSAK- ZAVADSKY’S CREATIVE BIOGRAPHY

Abstract

This article studies the creative method of the writer Veniamin Valerianovich Korsak (real surname: Zavadsky) (1884 1944), who has been overlooked for a long time due to the lack of reprints of his works and insufficient study of archive sourses. From the 1920s through the early 1940s, Korsak’s worldview was influenced by his understanding of the mission of preserving Russian spiritual culture in exile that strengthened the writer’s connection to Russian classical literature, especially with the N.V. Gogol’s creative and spiritual way. Gogol’s ideological and artistic legacy was first perceived in Korsak’s memoir series from the 1920s, in which the author tackles the problem of World War I and the Civil War by employing Gogolian characters of “The Inspector General” and “Dead Souls” and themes of “little person”, universal evil and banality. In his late 1920s short stories Korsaк shifted his attention to folklore and mystical stories by drawing the images in Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” and “Mirgorod”, through which the writer sought to create cycle of stories based on the motif of eros and idea of Eternal womanhood. In this period Gogol’s impact is particularly evident in Korsak’s story “The lamb’s head” (1929), where the fantastic image of Basavryuk functions as a symbol of evil and “phenomenon of immortal human submissiveness”. The writer began to envision a utopia based on Gogol’s aesthetic moralism and religiousromantic dream of transforming life and man by creating an idyllic pre-revolutionary Russia in his autobiographical tetralogy “Yura” of the 1930s. In this works Korsak integrate Gogol’s idea of a new social system and righteous economic management based on Christianity, described in the book “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends”. Dedicating his “Lyric-philosophical-publicistic” trilogy “One” (1951), “Together” (1952), “With all together” (1952) to the emigrant theme, essence of art and the impact of Western culture on Russian literature, Korsak raises the same issues, set by Gogol in the “Petersburg Tales”, especially in the “Portrait”. The writer affirms the idea of religious significance for true art as a path to God, thus justifying his own creative path. Korsak’s oeuvres at the same time address the false assumptions of the idea “revolution as instrument for eradicating Gogol’s characters from Russia”. Korsak’s utopian vision emphasizes the importance of religion and memory for transforming the past as a second reality. However, Gogol’s significance is not limited to the formation of the writer’s worldview, but also determining the literary tendency in his works. Korsak’s understanding of Gogol’s principles shapes his own literary style through embracing “romantic realism” and preserving the documentary-autobiographical basis in his works.