PAST AND FUTURE IN HOME LIFE IN RUSSIA: CHICHIKOV AND THE LANDOWNERS

Home Life in Russia (1854) is a distorted translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, aiming mainly at forming a negative image of Russia and its people. The original key idea of spiritual rebirth is replaced by that of Russia’s moral inferiority to Britain, shifting the focus to the present, originally subordinate to the past and future. The article examines how the original temporal imagery transforms in the novel. Home Life in Russia and Dead Souls are examined using comparative, cultural-historical and hermeneutical methods. The now specified present moves from the 1830s to the1840s, helping to accentuate everyday problems as opposed to the existential ones. The characters originally serving as anthropological models (Krivonos) become (ethno)social types. They are said to reliably demonstrate the current state of Russian society, depicted as barbaric, backward, and morally decayed while also full of ambition, enterprise, and the urge to acquire. In general, each of the characters strongly resembles the original one, but the most significant indications of their potential spiritual rebirth, both implicit (the landowners) and explicit (Tchichikoff), disappear from the text. This notably reduces mentions of the characters’ future and past, allowing them to escape the dead(ly) present. These changes occur both in the plot and narrative. Tchichikoff and Plyushkin, connected both in the original by the prospect of their spiritual rebirth and in Home Life in Russia by the finality of their fall, transform the most noticeably. Transforming or omitting the depictions of the characters’ past and future, the author reduces them to the image they have in the present. Each of them becomes a static, complete picture in the newly created gallery of morals.

Gogol, Dead Souls, image of the future, free translation