How Nikolai Gogol's “Enchanted Place” was Made

Abstract

The article is devoted to the last short story by Nikolai Gogol — “Enchanted Place” — which concludes the second part of the collection “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” (1829–1832). The article traces both borrowed from folklore or from the works of other writers, and original narrative techniques that make up a strictly thought-out system. Theese techniques aim to attract the reader’s attention, to intrigue him with the “strange” nature of the narrative, the “strange” events that make up the plot, as well as the defamiliarized images of space and time. It manifests not only at the stylistic level of the story, but also at the phonetic and figurative ones. Thus, the device of artistic ostranenie (the term described in the works of Viktor Shklovsky and other representatives of the formal school, usually translated as “defamiliarization” or “estrangement”) serves as one of the brightest exponents of Gogol’s work. The effects of strangeness and surprise help the author to influence the reader’s imagination in such a way that he believes in the reality of the described supernatural events, objects, creatures, as well as in the reality of the transformations of the landscape on different sides of the invisible border between “real” and “magic” worlds.

Keywords

• nikolai gogol
• “enchanted place
• ” narrative technique
• plot construction
• mythopoetic landscape
• fairy tale
• estrangement