«I See a City so Far Away that doesn’t Exist…» (Pre-War Novgorod in K. Paustovsky’s Novel «The Smoke of the Fatherland»)

Abstract

The article is devoted to a special urban space – pre-war Novgorod, recreated by K. G. Paustovsky after a trip to the Russian North in the late 1930s. On the pages of the novel, the writer pays attention to the Pushkin Mountains, Odessa, and Leningrad but the chapters about Novgorod can be read as an independent text. The material of the study was the epistolary and literary heritage of the writer, in which there are references to Novgorod, the novel The Smoke of the Fatherland, which has a difficult publicist’s history. The aim of the study is to recreate the image of pre-war Novgorod, described by Paustovsky, not as a museum city but a city with a unique appearance, where the past and present, nature, art and culture, and traditions coexist. The article is based on socio-critical, hermeneutical, semiotic, and discursive approaches. The main conclusions of the article are related to the fact that the novel, which bears the stamp of its time, the lyrical and romantic attitude of the writer of the 1930s and 1940s, maybe, if it is returned to the urban Novgorod text, relevant, and Paustovsky, pushed to the periphery, should remain in the space of Russian literature, Russian culture. The choice of material is due not only to academic interest in Paustovsky’s work but also to concern about the fate and pressing problems of the city. Firstly, the visual range of the novel allows us to reconstruct the pre-war image of the city, which does not exist since it was almost completely destroyed during the Great Patriotic War. Secondly, the proposed plans for the restoration of the city (in particular, Academician Shchusev) were often corrected, changed by local authorities, were not fully implemented, and short-term pragmatic solutions often won. Novgorod is still going through transformations today, and one can only hope and believe that the time will come to return the lost face, the historical appearance to the city. Paustovsky’s novel will allow the reader to compare pre-war Novgorod with today’s appearance of the city, devoid of integrity and structure, and to think about its preservation.

Keywords

• paustovsky
• novgorod
• the novel “the smoke of the fatherland”
• romantic
• church
• frescoes