The "deep compositional structure" of Vladimir Sollogub's essay "The Tarantas. Travel Impressions" (1845)
Authors:   Voronezh State Pedagogical University, Shpilevaya Galina A. , Bakhmetieva Irina A. ,   Voronezh State Pedagogical University, Bezrukova Vera V. ,   Voronezh State Pedagogical University
Published: December 2024

Since the appearance of the full text of Sollogub's "The Tarantas" (1845), critics and readers have been faced with a problem: how to explain the attractiveness of this work despite the plot-compositional system that is not distinguished by logic (the picture is disrupted by random "inserted short stories"), obvious failures in the subjective sphere (outstanding writers, Vissaarion Belinsky and Nikolay Nekrasov, paid attention to it as well), which, of course, makes it difficult to penetrate into the essence of the author's position. In this article, we attempted to consider Sollogub's "The Tarantas" from the point of view of the traditional "theory of the author" and to analyze this work, which surprisingly "eludes" analysis, from a structuralist position. The traditional "author theory", which fully explains the examples of the relationship between the positions of the conceptual author and the biographical author, as well as the relationship between the characters (presumably narrators) and the author-creator, to some extent provides answers to the questions posed by Belinsky and Nekrasov in their reviews. However, the method proposed by Boris Uspensky, according to our research experience, makes it possible for us to see the phenomena revealed from the point of view of the "deep compositional structure", for example, the author's hidden ideological position, inviting the "conceptualized reader" to speak about commercialized literature (from "literary masters", producing something like Paul de Kock's "The Milkmaid of Montfermeil") and the real one, "masterful, but obsolete". Thus, it is no coincidence that Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol are mentioned in this regard. The instability and uncertainty of the author's "ideological" (evaluative) point of
view, interfering with the "phraseological" one (the characters' self-defining), the "spatial-temporal" one (for example, Ivan Vasilyevich's "flying" walk over Russia in a utopian topos reflected by the exegetical narrator), and the "psychological" one (the correlation between a subjective opinion and fact, for example, Vasily Ivanovich's, Ivan Vasilyevich's and the author's views on the tarantas, the embodiment of practical life and fantastic ideas), is due to the fact that in some fragments of "The Tarantas" the elements of the subjective spheres enter into inharmonious relationships, which makes the overall plot and compositional system eclectic and creates genre ambiguity. Undoubtedly, Sollogub was a gifted writer, who did not become a classic. However, he remained at the level of a fiction writer on the "scale of values". Not being able to create a truly new significant form that would influence the development of the entire literary process, the author did his utmost, namely: endeavored to describe the morals and life of the inhabitants of Moscow, Vladimir, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, and to hold a conversation about the future of Russia, its culture, economy and other aspects of public life (which, of course, was and is extremely interesting to the reader).