ABOUT “REALISMS” (STORY BY O. N. OLNEM А QUIET CORNER AND LITERARY MEMOIRS OF SERGEY DURYLIN IN THE NATIVE CORNER) Cover Image

О «РЕАЛИЗМАХ» (РАССКАЗ О. Н. ОЛЬНЕМ «ТИХИЙ УГОЛ» И ЛИТЕРАТУРНЫЕ ВОСПОМИНАНИЯ С. Н. ДУРЫЛИНА «В РОДНОМ УГЛУ»)
ABOUT “REALISMS” (STORY BY O. N. OLNEM А QUIET CORNER AND LITERARY MEMOIRS OF SERGEY DURYLIN IN THE NATIVE CORNER)

Author(s): Gennady Karpenko
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Fiction, Studies of Literature, Russian Literature, Philology
Published by: Петрозаводский государственный университет
Keywords: Olnem; Durylin; empirical and сhristian realism; world view, event horizon; hierarchy of values

Summary/Abstract: The article studies and compares various possibilities of Russian classical realism, it reveals and describes the features of constructing images of the world in the works of O. N. Olnem (V. N. Tsekhovskaya) and S. N. Durylin. The pictures of the world by Olnem and Durylin are limited mainly by the manor topos. Localization of the events within the manor space is the key for the presence of the same objective and spiritual realities in the analyzed works, nevertheless, distributed and correlated differently. While the “narrative levels” in Durylin’s memoirs (subject, functional, socio-historical, subjective-personal, cultural-historical, Christian ones) are value-coordinative and the Orthodox determines theoanthropic “verticality” of the estate world, in Olnem’s description all the “estate elements” are coordinate and exist in the horizon of a personal or social event, they are factographic, only psychologically and / or socially colored, and the “Christian event lasting in eternity” loses its world-organizing function and is present as a formal rhetorical tradition. The difference in the actualization by Olnem and Durylin of the value of narrative levels is expressed in the implied meanings of the name — A Quiet Corner, In the Home Corner. The writers relate the “Manor Corner” to silence. However, if for Durylin the “quiet”, “silence” is a spiritual complex that expresses the Christ-like essence of a person, for Olnem, silence is a socio-historical category, designed to mark semantically the process of disappearance of the “noble nest,” silence as a synonym for death. Thus, no matter how close the work of the writers came together in substantive content, no matter how similar and related they were, the “watershed” separating them, in the words of V. V. Rozanov, turns out to be the “attitude to faith, God”. This difference determines the existence of different "realisms" in Russian literature and, consequently, of different reading and research strategies.

  • Issue Year: 18/2020
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 221-247
  • Page Count: 26
  • Language: English, Russian