Rus Devrimi’nde Gogol

Gogol is the most mysterious of all Russian writers, and still little has been done for his recognition. He is more mysterious than Dostoevsky, who goes to great lengths to reveal all the contradictions and all the abysses of his soul. In his soul and in his works, it is seen how the devil struggles with God. Gogol, on the other hand, keeps an unsolved secret in himself and takes him to the grave. There's something really scary about it. Gogol is the only Russian writer with a sense of magic, he artistically conveys the action of dark, evil magical forces. He probably gets it from the West, from Catholic Poland. Terrible Revenge was written with such a spell. The same spell is more implicitly found in Dead Souls and Inspector. Gogol feels bad very strongly. He does not find the consolation that Dostoevsky found in the image of Zosima and in the touch of mother earth. He doesn't have those sticky leaves, nowhere can he escape the evil mouths that surround him. Old school Russian critics can hardly feel the eerie nature of Gogol's art.

Spaces of History and Memory: The Works on the Anti-Rightist Campaign

This chapter approaches history as a central concern in Wang Bing’s filmmaking. It deals with spaces of history and memory, in particular in relation to the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–59. It highlights Wang’s interest in unveiling the gaps and the contradictions imbued in state narratives at different epochs. A close reading of Wang’s only full-length feature film so far The Ditch (2010) and a comparative reading of it with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) are given in the first section of the chapter. The second section focuses on Wang’s mature work Dead Souls (2018) as a visual archive of witnesses on the campaign and as a way to testify to historical injustice, also recalling Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985).

“Dead Souls” in the Activities of a Joint-Stock Company: The Legal Nature and Legal Consequences

Introduction: in the paper, the authors highlight the problems of having “dead souls” or “lost” shareholders in a joint-stock company. The ways of their solution are analyzed. The purpose is to consider the advantages and disadvantages of “dead souls” in a joint-stock company. The question is raised about the need to modernize the legislation to solve this problem. Using the methods of scientific cognition, the authors analyzed the legal essence and legal consequences of the presence of “dead souls” (deceased shareholders) in the activities of joint-stock companies in order to identify the areas for improving the legislation in the field of regulating “dead souls” in a joint-stock company. Results: currently, joint-stock companies have difficulties with missing participants in the register, referred to as “dead souls”. This may cause significant losses to the joint-stock company and negatively affect the continuation of its activities. Conclusions: the majority of joint-stock companies that have previously fulfilled the obligation to maintain their own register do not now have the ability to control the personal data of shareholders and their participants. As a result, in this country, most joint-stock companies have difficulties with the presence of a general quorum at the general meetings of shareholders (50% + 1 share).

The old garden

Smirnov’s essay is devoted to an episode from Gogol’s Dead Souls [Myortvye dushi]; rather a landscape than an episode. In Gogol’s opinion, a landscape is not a copy of nature but an artist’s creation. A landscape is meant to be created, not copied from nature: the role of a master craftsman is not to usher the viewer along the trimmed bosquets of a French formal garden, unsurprising and immediately recognisable, but to lure them into the thicket of his imagination. It is with such a fruit of imagination that we are faced in the case of the neglected, unruly and overgrown garden on the landowner Plyushkin’s estate. The author examines Gogol’s description of the garden in detail, almost word by word, uncovering the hidden symbolic meaning of contrasting the village, ugly in its state of neglect, with the landowner’s garden, equally neglected but beautiful nonetheless. What is piles of rubbish in the village streets becomes pretty fallen leaves on the garden paths; the author suggests that Gogol used this contrast to let nature ‘correct’ the gardener, i. e. to remove the incompetent human alterations and reveal itself in its full glory.

P. Merime’s Essay “Nikolai Gogol”

Merimee’s essay “Nikolai Gogol”, in which the author presented the Russian writer as an imitator of European models, a satirist who focused on portraying the flaws of Russian life, a writer who neglects the plausibility of the overall composition is considered in the article. The author of this article shows that such a superficial and biased approach to Gogol’s texts aroused indignation among Russian journalists in both 19th century capitals and continues to be criticized by Russian and French literary critics. The results of a comparative analysis of the essay “Nikolai Gogol” with reviews of French-speaking journalists who wrote about the author of “The Inspector General” and “Dead Souls” in Parisian magazines of the 1840s are presented in the article. The question is raised that the motives that prompted Merimee to turn to the work of Gogol, and the reasons for the bias in relation to his work are still unrevealed. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that the essay by Mérimée is for the first time considered as a commentary on the stable aesthetic position of the French writer, discordant with the poetics of romanticism and realism. The author dwells on the study of a number of artistic devices of the works of Merimee in the 1820—1840s and his genre preferences in the 1850s.

Nikolai Gogol in silent films

The article is devoted to the problem of Nikolai Gogol's interpretation on Russian screen. The problem of interaction between literature and cinematography is considered in a concrete historical plan, that is connected with the features of the time in which Gogol`s film adaptations were created. At the same time, the level of technical equipment of cinematography and other inherent qualities of it, that are largely determined the approach of the first directors to specific Gogol material, were taken into account. Cinema interpretations like «Dead Souls» by Pyotr Chardynin, «Taras Bulba» by Alexander Drankov, «Christmas Eve» and «The Portrait» by Ladislas Starevich, «The Overcoat» by Georgi Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg are in the centre of the article. Each of the listed film adaptations has its own specifics determined by close connection with other types of art, fragmentariness, melodramatic, an abundance of phantasmagorias, etc. «The Overcoat» stands out in the list of silent interpretations, since presents a new look at the process of Gogol's translation from the language of literature into the cinema language. Compared to previous films, the creators of the 1926 cinematic version of «The Overcoat» took into account Gogol's style, the mood of his work, recreated through the picture of the ghostly expressionist Petersburg.