«Абсурдность» бродячих сюжетов

Abstract

While presupposing that every culture evolves based on its own specific terms, this discussion poses the question of how one of Russia's main cultural and literary characteristics emerges within these two realms. Following research in historical poetics on permanent theme and motif-related (subject) schemes, which form the basis of oral or written artistic expression and pass from one country to another, the question that poses itself is how these consequent “travelling themes” pass from one (according to A. Flaker) style formation into another, from one phase of literary and cultural development into another. Emphasis is placed on the theme and motif scheme, shaped around the semantic field /motif of “desperate boredom” (скука, тоска) and affecting the narrative strategy in works of important Russian writers of the 19th and 20th century (Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Sorokin, Makanin etc).Following the thoughts of A. Camus, boredom, on one hand, mani-fests itself as one of the fundamental emotions, leading man from everyday routine, while on the other hand resembling the idea of uneventness in which, taking into consideration research done by the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, an explosive event (взрывное событие) occurs, thereby bringing to life the characteristic of so-called absurd consciousness.An irrationally conceived (explosive) event, which should be treated as the passing of character/man across the border of the semantic field, is most frequently accepted as the bringing down of (in the words of Russian-American culturologist M. Epstein) the “firm structure” (of law / prohibition) in a desire to transcend the weakly experienced present (desperate boredom). Analysis shows two consequences related to this passing: it can change into a projection of the future, where absurd consciousness appears as an attempt to clear the language of the past usque ad nihilum – “to nothing” (the Russian avant-garde) or it can manifest itself as a return of the past in the form of “the uncanny“ (das Unheimliche), which in the works of Russian “fellow travellers” (попутчики) and nonconformists resembles the idea of social realism as an “era of confusion” (смутное время).The discussion also dwells on the creativity of N.Gogol and his The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, as this par-ticular text turns out to be a proto-text in the development of absurd consciousness, at the same time embodying the rules that govern the development of “travelling” theme and motif schemes.