Abstract
For a long time Gogol’s recognition as a great Russian writer has been accompanied with a conviction that he is not – and can not be – of any importance to the world literature. Since the end of the 19th century this opinion has been revised and is radically refuted nowadays, but there have been reasons for it. Its cause was the social and political backwardness of Russia, on the one hand, and idiosyncratic features of Gogol’s aesthetics, on the other. Gogol undermined the wide-spread belief that there was a direct correspondence between aesthetic values, signifi cance and achievement and social relations and ideas. The signifi cance is the result of the whole complex of human relationships, including, Gogol believed,the very commonplace and petty troubles of life which, contrary to conventional views of the period, can be a basis of the high art. This is one of Gogol’s paradoxes with which the article is concerned.
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