Multidimensional space of philology

The review is dedicated to the book by V. S. Krivonos, a well-known literary scholar, researcher of N. V. Gogol’s work and the Russian literature of the 19th-21st centuries, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor of Samara State Social and Pedagogical University. The monograph, which has an unusual title for academic literary criticism, reveals different aspects of the scholar’s interests: it contains academic articles, research on the history of philological science, and closes with an unexpected section “On the Borders of Philology and Literature”, where the author acts as a witty mystifier and stylizer. The book has a tense internal plot, the three main sections of the monograph are united by recurrent motifs that are revealed in different ways in historical, literary and biographical contexts. The first section of the book, in line with classical literary criticism, is dedicated to the analysis of prose of the 19th-20th centuries, from Bestuzhev-Marlinsky to Sasha Sokolov. The defining and unifying feature of the majority of the articles here is the clearly verified interrelation of the historical and theoretical approaches to text analysis. The articles included in the section, on the one hand, demonstrate the unique specific features of this or that author’s oeuvre, on the other hand, they show the organic unity of the writers’ works, which the researcher looks at largely through Gogol’s “optics”. The second section contains valuable research and biographical materials about the greatest philologists who influenced the author: A. P. Skaftymov, B. F. Egorov, Yu. N. Chumakov. The study of the “text of fate”, the understanding of the role of chance and the problem of choice in the biographies of outstanding Russian literary scholars unite this section with the first, where these topics are analyzed on the material of literary texts. In the third section, the author enters into a lively dialogue with the heroes of his research, presenting to the reader possible continuations of the plots of classical and modern literature.