“Little Russian” Paradise and Hell: Nikolai Gogol’s The Old-World Landowners as a Pastoral Dystopia

Abstract

The article considers the genre specificity of Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Old- World Landowners (Starosvyetskiye pomeshchiki) (1835), which refers to the so-called Ukrainian stories. The genre features of the work are analyzed, which give grounds to consider it as a dystopia: the danger of possible mankind degeneration due to rejection of philanthropy and infatuation with material values; the presence of the topii of two worlds – “ideal” and imperfect. Gogol successfully changed the established literary stereotypes in Russian literature by means of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (Vechera na hutore bliz Dikanki) and Mirgorod – by his own utopian project, which turned into 242 Денис Чик, Ольга Чик a real pastoral anti-utopia. The death of the main characters symbolizes the collapse of the illusory, lucrative and exemplary economy of the Cossack officers who received the noble rights in the Russian Empire and were fully integrated into the imperial upper circles. The story The Old-World Landowners by Gogol is the image of a terminated Cossack epoch and the creation of a new – total integration of Little Russian nobles into the “body” of the Russian Empire of the XIX century.