"Little Man" in the context of the narrative structure of the work: "Overcoat" by N. V. Gogol and "Irrepressible Tambourine" by A.M. Remizov

Demidov Nikita Mikhailovich ORCID: 0000-0001-8336-4333 Postgraduate student, Department of Theory of Literature, Lomonosov Moscow State University 123181, Russia, Moscow, Isakovsky str., 28k2, sq. 574 josefkessler.vonwissenstein@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Remizov's reception of Gogol's legacy — both the philosophical and mystical perception of the figure of the classic and the creative reflection on the poetics of his works - is large—scale and has not been fully disclosed. Among the many aspects of stylistic and thematic influence, the figure of the "little man" is of particular interest, presented in different ways by the writers. This type of literary character, having undergone a serious transformation in Remizov's works, retained a number of features that cannot be explained, limiting themselves to the traditional indication of the category of the image, interpreting it exclusively from a meaningful point of view. The serious adjustments that Remizov first made to the specified type of hero in the story "The Irrepressible Tambourine" also attract attention for their close formal connection with the narrative structure of the work and a different way of organizing it than Gogol's in "The Overcoat". It should be noted that the difference in the narrative strategies of the writers, although it sets the key features of the approach to image construction, but at the same time emphasizes both similarities and differences in the dynamics of the behavior of the characters in the artistic world of the works (Stratilatov from "Irrepressible Tambourine" and Akaky Akakievich from "Overcoat", respectively). These important observations, which will be disclosed in this article, will allow not only to clarify the literary parallels between the stories of the two authors, but also to present in more detail the multifaceted semantic fullness of the term "little man", since considering it at the appropriate level is unthinkable without the accompanying elements of composition, especially details, and recognition of a certain function in the narrative. To begin with, we will try to trace the logic of the artistic embodiment of this category in Gogol.

Gogol's Bashmachkin was preceded by a rich literary tradition of depicting an unhappy, suffering person, in particular an artist. Well-known parallels with Hoffmann's "Golden Pot" ^{[1, p. 193]}, where the rewriting motif is also present, include Akaky Akakievich in the mainstream of the late Romantic literary tradition with its mysticism and emphasis on the ambivalent nature of the hero. The physiological essay (of both Russian and French origin) introduces the theme of the poor official, ranging from a predominantly satirical to a sentimental, pitiful characterization of such an image. "The Overcoat" synthesizes sublime and everyday elements, transforming romantic tradition through the combination of their contrasts, as noted by Yu. Mann: "rewriting and the overcoat have in common that these are everyday, pressing, imperfect and, of course, not transcendental concerns. Meanwhile, they are given in such a way, experienced by the hero of the story in such a way as if these goals are transcendental" ^{[5, p. 624]}. However, the romantic principle is not only subjected to travestification at the level of the image of Akaky Akakievich, whose character structure is characterized by a discrepancy between a high aspiration and a mundane goal, but also fades into the background due to a special position within the narrative structure of the "Overcoat". It is known that eventfulness, being a prerequisite for a narrative text, implies the relevance of a certain change in artistic reality, regardless of whether such a change represents a factual change or a moral shift in the soul of the hero, expressed in the form of an internal monologue or in other ways. It is important that, in relation to the literary hero, such a transition itself depends on the intra—textual axiology, or rather, on the axiology of the experiencing subject ^{[9, p. 16]}. The very modeling of the plot, in which, according to Lotman, the transition from one semantic field to another is carried out ^[4], is largely based on such a function of experiencing the subject, but in the "Overcoat" this role is assumed by the narrator. The same is true in terms of emphasizing an event essential to fictitious reality, which ensures the gradation of the narrative in the work: this is the overcoming of the external "automatism" of Bashmachkin's behavior and the assumption of a secret, inner life existing in him, expressed in the change of the object of passion — from rewriting to overcoat. Despite the fact that recognizing an event as important from the point of view of the character is not the only criterion of eventfulness, it turns out to be most closely related to the hero of the work and shows a decrease in emphasis on him as a speaking authority, which allows us to characterize in more detail the place and logic of the presence of the "little man" in the narrative. In the Czech literary tradition, there is a term that successfully indicates the naturalness and thoughtfulness from the point of view of the author's strategy of the presence of an element in the narrative or composition of a work: "ukotven?", literally "embedding" in the context, correlating with something, in this case, with the matrix of the text ^[13]. This is linked, in the author's opinion, to a set of plotological concepts — an event (but not as a storytelling event), a situation, artistic time and space, as well as narratological concepts — narrator, point of view, narration and composition. The connecting element of the concepts of plot and composition in its narrow, narratological understanding in the "Overcoat" will be a detail that, in addition to its usual descriptive function, has a plot-forming purpose and, due to the simultaneous presence of a plot plan and a narrative plan in the author's organization of his narrative strategy, can characterize the subjects of the image and storytelling throughout the narrative. Let's consider its purpose in more detail.

Gogol's detail has a rather complicated history of development, the dynamics of which is noticeably intense already in "In the evenings on a farm near Dikanka". The effect of a living story, supported by the narrator both in the form of an appeal to an imaginary listener (on behalf of Rudy Panko), and as a book narrative with an addressee reader, abound in details that represent a vivid flavor of the narrative - including redundant ones, which will remain as an integral feature of Gogol's poetics in his later works. Regardless of the figure of the narrator and the type of interference between the narrator's text and the character's text, the detail has both descriptive and descriptive significance due to its "epistemological uncertainty" ^[11]: in "Evenings ...", the connection of the folklore archetype with the archaic human fear of the mystery and complexity of the universe acts as such a property. With the complication of the writer's strategy, the detail also retained — and this is clearly visible on the example of the St. Petersburg novels — the connection with chaos, disorganization, regulating not only artistic space and time. This happened due to a change in the approach to the use of the grotesque, which distanced itself from the direct depiction of evil spirits in early novels and began to emphasize evil as such, whose receptacle human souls become – "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Portrait" follow in line with this trend. In relation to other texts of the collection, especially "The Overcoat", it is appropriate to talk about a narrative grotesque. Curiously, in the story preceding it, "Notes of a Madman", which also depicts a small man, the narrative grotesque is expressed in a visual way — an emphasis on mixing reality and the improbability of a certain event or Poprishchin's reasoning (which, from the point of view of narrative, are also an event as an image of thoughts relevant to the character, replacing each other and demonstrating a progressive increase in insanity) — and therefore appears more openly to the reader. So, in the grotesque reality in which the action of "Notes ..." unfolds, the incredible events and illogical statements of the hero have their own internal logic and gradation, together connecting the disintegrating insane consciousness of the hero, for whom the generated images are true and real. Thanks to the grotesque, the obvious, at first glance, diegetic narrative — on behalf of Poprishchin himself — receives a rather specific illumination: the hero, sinking more and more into madness, tends not only to the complete disintegration of personality, but also to the denial of his human dignity, not understanding himself on whose behalf he speaks ^{[3, p. 48]}. His status as a little man consists of a whole series of "leaps" of grotesque details introduced in the course of the narrative, marking the boundaries of artistic space, and is unthinkable without them. Gogol moves from the visual representation of the narrative grotesque to its more complex forms of implementation, which is clearly seen in the example of the "Overcoat".

The evolution of the grotesque indicated by us in Gogol has already become the subject of consideration in science. Nevertheless, the change in the nature of the depicted event in connection with the "taming of the grotesque" ^[5] during the transition from the mythopoeic, folklore to the ontological description of evil includes cases when absurdity and illogicality as the main characteristics of the grotesque are directly related to the introduction, "embedding" of the character in the narrative structure. The artistic concept of Akaky Akakievich as a small man implies not only an unenviable social position, the insignificance of nature, but also his vulnerability as an actor in the narrative: the differentiation of the points of view of the character and the narrator becomes impossible, the author plays with literary masks, using the form of an ornamental tale, at first as if taking the side of those who mocked Bashmachkin in the story, but closer By the end, he gently leads the reader to a humanistic conclusion. Bashmachkin's misadventures up to the tragic finale in such a fantastic manner are based on the reorientation of the detail function from descriptive to narrative, on the formation of plot dynamics, fixing the transition from the hero's obsession with his service to the desire to purchase an overcoat. The horizon of readers' expectations, formed by the author and assuming from the reader the task of building a complete image of Bashmachkin with the help of numerous details of the objective world, is built against the background of an unexpected, sometimes unusual transition from one event to another from the point of view of the plot material. More precisely, the way of telling the story contradicts the narrator's desire to tell the story of a poor official ^[7]. A typical example is the bizarre topography of St. Petersburg, which makes up the main part of the artistic space of the "Overcoat" and is replete with hyperbole: the streets along the route of Akaky Akakievich to and from are either deserted or busy, the square expands and narrows. As in "Notes...", the illogical and the fantastic (including the final scene) cannot be opposed to the real, they do not represent an opposition at the narrative level, but Bashmachkin himself does not lend himself to "autonomous" consideration outside the context of the narrative structure of the work. The "embeddedness" of the little man in the context of the work, which we mentioned above, is enhanced precisely due to the horizon of reader expectations skillfully organized by the author: it is connected both with the poetics of the "Overcoat" and with its historical projection in line with the development of the novel genre (genre studies). The genre of physiological essay we mentioned, transformed by Gogol, was oriented towards empirical reality, well known to the contemporary reader, and came from a well-known social life. This meant not the absolute predictability of the content and aesthetic content of such texts, but the transparency and openness of the dialogue between the author and the reader, which is actually absent in Gogol's works — the "epistemological uncertainty" of the author himself is also characteristic of the narrator and complicates the very possibility of such a dialogue. One can even say that Gogol, at the expense of the image of Akaky Akakievich, subjected to a noticeable transformation the content of the literary form of an entire genre that is already going back in time. Numerous predecessors of Bashmachkin (for example, "The Artist" Timofeev, "Jonah Faddeevich" Ushakov) with an almost resonant, typical characteristic of them responded to the idea that the human world, despite its complexity or unpredictability, can be learned more closely, and there is simply no other basis for a reader's reception ^{[14, s. 473]}. Gogol's habitual unfolding of the story through the actions and deeds of the characters does not serve as an intermediary instance between the abstract author and the reader, as well as the narrator and the fictitious reader (given that the ideology and assessment of these instances in the story are very close to each other), and the "Overcoat" is a good example of such an interpretative limit when the character is completed with from the point of view of the semantics of the image, but it does not represent a semiotic whole.

The construction of the image of a little man as one of the elements of the poetics of early Remizov largely inherits the mechanism described in the "Overcoat". The writer actively absorbed Gogol's experience both through his works and indirectly through Dostoevsky. It is well known that the rethinking of the character structure of the hero of "The Overcoat" and the polemic with it in the novel "Poor People" in the person of Makar Devushkin, which, on the one hand, is directed against Gogol's epigones, as V.V. Vinogradov wrote about, and on the other — against the very approach of the author of "The Overcoat". Dostoevsky's structural reworking of the "little man" was solely connected with the complication of the dynamics of his image, an attempt to concretize his inner aspirations and aspirations, when the corresponding sphere of character and spirituality in Gogol was impenetrable. Nevertheless, this approach, associated with the hope of reviving the dignity and individuality of a small person, did not have a significant impact on the transformation of this image in Remizov — the writer chose a different strategy and did not follow Dostoevsky, developing the poetics of Gogol's details, which contributed to the complication of the indirect characterization of the image through the objective world: this also applies to a small person who in the "Irrepressible Tambourine" is Stratilatov.

Remizov, following Gogol, relies on detail as a key aspect of narrative strategy, but does it in a slightly different way. First of all, the details are combined into complex series that relate to each other within the framework of both the fictitious reality of the work and the neo-mythological context, which archetypally goes back to folk popular novels of an entertaining nature and, in general, ancient Russian mass literature of frivolous content. The mythopoetic content harmoniously coexists with the realistic one and does not complicate the narrative in itself, however, its more systematic organization with the help of detail has the form of a well-traced motivic structure than Gogol's. This is, first of all, the antinomy of the diabolical and sacred principles, between which Stratilatov's soul is torn. These beginnings are significantly complicated by the grotesque discrepancy between the stylization of the story as a household joke and the tragic plot.

Stratilatov himself, the main character of the story, is immersed in a social environment, whose representatives are more sympathetic to the character than to Bashmachkin. The ridicule of colleagues does not prevent the hero, who holds a modest position in court, from making plans and finding joy in everyday life — Gogol's hero is unable to actively respond to events. Stratilatov's self-consciousness is more developed than Bashmachkin's, is a logical expression of his, according to one of the heroes of the story, "nature", there is no trace of the downtroddenness of Gogol's character, who does not fit into society completely. Nature means an active interest in the unusual, having a history (the hero's love for antiques) or violating the taboo boundary — the story is perceived as the "genesis of the apology of Eros" for a reason ^{[2, p. 71]}. Remizov's key narrative tool, like Gogol's, is a detail that is not limited to its main descriptive function, but the specifics of its use determine the place of the little man in the narrative in a different way: the image itself is actualized by leitmotives and cyclic forms of various kinds, including through lexical repetitions. Usually, the tendency to cyclization significantly slows down the narrative (which is typical of ornamental prose), but in this case the character's image is constantly being supplemented and updated due to the fact that each "turn" of the cycle brings something new, and Stratilatov, despite his squalor and caricature, turns out to be determined not by simple voluptuousness. Akaky Akakievich is also not defined by social injustice alone, but, as we wrote above, his inner life is autonomous, mysterious: manic concentration on rewriting, then on the overcoat allows us to speak only about concentration on a certain passion, which as an element of mental life is not embedded in the narrative structure of the work, its internal mechanism can only be reconstructed based on external, substantive details. The situation is different with Stratilatov's idee fixe, which lies in the sphere of eros: his tossing between the sinful and the sacred, reflected by constantly updating details and details, leads to an inglorious demise, stylistically reduced to a household joke, consolidating the image of a little man both in the usual social and neo-mythological terms, referring to the archetype of a demon vainly trying to become human and rise to a higher level of moral hierarchy. The Remizov style from the earliest texts, including the novel "The Pond", combined an unusual way of organizing literary material and an emphasis on the existential tragedy of being; as E. Obatnin writes about the manner of Remizov's prose, "most of all it resembled the relaxed ligature of "oral" speech imprinted on the letter. In order to capture the rhythm and intonation of the voiced narration, reproduced by innovative visual means, the texts had to be read as a musical score" ^{[6, p. 17]}. Rhythmized narration, as well as the tendency to cyclization, often suggests (a classic example is A. Bely's "Silver Dove") a weakening of eventfulness, dynamics in principle, which in "Irrepressible Tambourine" is compensated by skillful stylization under a household anecdote — a genre a priori implying a curious incident with developed narrative and handling of plot material — which it breaks up into many smaller comical situations (ridicule of Stratilatov himself in the office, an episode with a non-firing pistol, the story of police chief Zhiganovsky, etc.). It cannot be excluded that such genre stylization is closely related to Remizov's interest in all sorts of absurdities, ridiculous situations that are ridiculous, but at the same time tragicomic (which, from the point of view of the meaningful mode, makes "Irrepressible Tambourine" related to the works of the collection "Mirgorod" by Gogol, especially with "How Ivan Ivanovich quarreled ..."). However, unlike Gogol, the fates of Remizov's heroes are not at the intersection of longing and the comic, but torment and the absurd. As already mentioned, Stratilatov, unlike Gogol's Bashmachkin, in terms of plot organization in his actions and deeds does not manifest himself as a "little man" with his suffering and a modest assessment of his capabilities and place in society — he is rather closer to the image of a Russian buffoon or clown, whose image is in modernity (especially foreign) has its own tradition ^{[10, s. 105]}. "Little Man" as a category is revealed in terms of narration, Remizov's filigree work with a narrative structure; Remizov's works — and "Irrepressible Tambourine" are no exception here — are replete with details that independently act as complex semiotic codes: these are words and concepts that set the reader up in a certain way, to specific mythological, cultural and historical associations. Gogol's lack of confidence in knowledge is not in sight, the author is full of hope to learn, to skip all the bizarre details, strokes through himself. In "The Overcoat" we observe how "the writer invariably forms a situation of "breaking" the narrative manner, completely changing the almost established idea of the character in the reader's mind", making maximum use of details of the outside world for this ^{[8, p. 126]}, in Remizov, the details do not "slow down" the narrative, but are a kind of points the attraction of reader activity. This also applies to the little man: the mythological subtext pushes Stratilatov into the background, defining his modest place not in the narrative, like Bashmachkin, and not at the plot level (both are again hindered by stylization under the genre of anecdote), but rather at the archetypal and metatextual level. The phenomena of reality bordering on the absurd and the eccentric world of stories told by Stratilatov are based on the phenomenon of the grotesque, which Remizov has associated with the concept of a symbol and performs two functions — highlighting a specific phenomenon and an attempt to master it in conjunction with the "author — implicit reader", and such development is relevant for the author himself. In the Irrepressible Tambourine, the narrator's speech distances itself from the subject-speech plan of the characters, approaching the position of an omniscient narrator, and the symbol, with characteristic signs of transitivity and instability for modernism, under the influence of the grotesque, becomes completely unintelligible for the characters of the story — but not for the narrator, who, in variations of motional structures, tries himself and invites the reader to immerse himself into the archaic and mythopoetic origins of being and Russian history to resolve important existential issues. A number of metatextual "roll calls" reflecting the gradation of the meanings of holiness and sin (such as, for example, the repeated mention of the miraculous icon of Fyodor Stratilat and the "Gavriliad") are fundamentally unknowable for Stratilatov, but significantly — for the reader — accessible to the narrator and related instances of the narrative structure. The main character's fear of the "Gavriliad" and his near-death tosses can be clarified as an underlying feeling of the transcendental from a meaningful point of view, as an awareness of his ugliness and vice before God, regardless of the actual seriousness of sin. From a narrative point of view, the role of the "jailer of meanings" is assigned to the grotesque, who leaves Stratilatov no chance to understand life and reality, in the walls of which he finds himself immured, despite even timid attempts at reflection. Stratilatov, as a little man, goes through a completely opposite path than Gogol's Bashmachkin, realizing on his deathbed the absurdity and absurdity of his life path without the possibility of overcoming his sinful archetypal nature.

"Irrepressible Tambourine" is one of the key works of early Remizov, which served as an impetus for the further development of the unique author's style and improvement of the theory of Russian fret developed by him. The image of the little man, whose embodiment is Stratilatov, can be considered not only a preliminary result of the reception of Gogol's poetics in the corresponding part, but also a transitional link between the realistic tradition and the tradition of modernity, to be more precise, literary expressionism. Already in the story "The Sisters of the Cross", the determinism of the hero by social circumstances, purely mundane, recedes into the background, and the existential tragedy of each of them is associated with categories of a transcendental order — first of all, with the archetype of suffering Russia, whose apocalyptic characteristic reaches its peak in the work. Remizov's character is infinitely small and insignificant in front of the chthonic principle and evil as such, which brings him closer to the heroes of such famous expressionist prose writers of the twentieth century as Gustav Meyrink, Ladislav Klima, etc. Such an anticipation is significant in that its origins are rooted in the particular case of the evolution of a certain element of poetics — in this case, the type of a little man — by the example of two authors in the context of observations of general changes in the mainstream of genre. These changes imply both a certain genre transformation in general (Gogol's rethinking of the physiological essay and the creation of a new pre-realistic literary paradigm in Russian literature) and an experimental understanding of the genre (Remizov's form of everyday anecdote, which was more private, not generally evolutionary in nature); it is important that it is thanks to the study of individual strategies of writers that it is possible to establish how Remizov not only acts as a diligent student and follower of Gogol, but reacts to the narrative semantics ^{[12, p. 362]} of the text of the "Overcoat", where the detail acts as a referent of the type of a small man and is complicated by elements of the grotesque. This observation indicates that the very concept of the little man, which has become the subject of analysis, goes beyond the image in a literary work and occupies an important place in the narrative structure, which is relevant in relation to other authors who exploit it, respectively.