Shinel', Polichinelle, Pulcinella: The Italian Ancestry of Akaky Bashmachkin
| Autor: | Olga S. Partan |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2005 |
| Předmět: |
Cultural Studies
Literature Linguistics and Language Literature and Literary Theory business.industry media_common.quotation_subject Ukrainian Subtext Art Comedy Language and Linguistics language.human_language Scholarship Poetics Novella language Narrative Performing arts business computer computer.programming_language media_common |
| Zdroj: | The Slavic and East European Journal. 49:549 |
| ISSN: | 0037-6752 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/20058345 |
| Popis: | "Does anything more need to be written about 'The Overcoat'?" (295). Al though Dmitry Chizhevsky posed this question several decades ago, the an swer is still a resounding "yes." This article offers a new perspective on "The Overcoat," suggesting that Nikolai Gogol drew on the Italian commedia del Varte character of Pulcinella while creating his quintessentially Russian civil servant, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin. I explore an Italianate subtext that has not been previously studied and suggest that core elements of the plot and narrative technique, as well as the name and personality of the protagonist, have strong parallels with elements of the commedia delVarte and its famous Pulcinella character, which Gogol was exposed to in Italy prior to writing "The Overcoat." The striking similarities between the Petersburgian Bash machkin and the Italian Pulcinella illustrate Vladimir Nabokov's perceptive observation that "Rome and Russia formed a combination of a deeper kind in Gogol's unreal world" (Nabokov 1980, 44). While literary scholars have addressed the significance of Italian contexts and subtexts in Gogol's novella Rome and his essays on Italian art and archi tecture, little attention has been paid to how Gogol's impressions of the Italian performing arts in general, and of the commedia delVarte in particular, may have influenced his artistic imagination and the poetics of "The Overcoat."1 This tendency reflects the well-established critical tradition of analyzing Gogol's oeuvre within either the Ukrainian or Russian cultural context. Despite the diversity of critical approaches to "The Overcoat"?from Boris Eikhen baum's formalist study to Daniel Rancour-Laferriere's psychoanalytical one existing scholarship views this story as being rooted within the Russian cultural context. My analysis of Italian themes supplements?rather than contradicts? the previous scholarship, and supports the view that "The Overcoat" is a "kaleidoscope" that is open to a "simultaneity of possible meanings" (Graffy 118, Brombert 53, Fanger 162). Many previous studies have analyzed Gogol's brilliant sense of comedy, his extensive use of grotesque imagery, his unforget |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|