VICTIMS IN GOGOL’S THE VIY AND NEVSKY PROSPECT
VICTIMS IN GOGOL’S THE VIY AND NEVSKY PROSPECT

Summary/Abstract: In Nevsky Prospect and The Viy Nikolay Gogol offers insight into his inner ego and id. In both stories Gogol deals with love, criticism, and victimization. Nevsky Prospect and The Viy are impregnated with the author’s self-struggle not to be a victim of love and social circumstances. The author feels that there is not and there simply cannot be a destruction and decay more terrible than the one of one’s growing a victim of his personal emotional selfishness. When this does happen, life turns into a fortress with no windows, becomes a tomb to which there is no light. As for the characters in these two stories, they genuinely felt that they loved, on that emotion building their golden castles of love, however also building their revolting dungeons of hate. It is true that love motivates life and living, in this being the force that stimulates activity and inspires. However, it is at the same time a mighty source of illusion. In presenting such ideas, Gogol’s selection of symbolic themes and style are amazing. Expressiveness in both characters and self-hesitation is conspicuous. The sphere of superior and the malevolence in victims are presented in rather abnormal style; his motivation was the Russian and Ukrainian ethnological stories, however not tending to use elements of folk life as a source and means of producing effects of something extraordinary. This is why the parallel could be placed and written about that both characters are victims of self-consciousness.

• Details
• Contents