PROVINCIJSKI MOTIVI I TEME U DRAMAMA GOGOLJA I ČEHOVA (REVIZOR, GALEB, TRI SESTRE
PROVINCIAL MOTIFS AND THEMES IN THE DRAMAS OF GOGOL AND CHEKHOV (THE GOVERMMENT INSPECTOR, THE SEAGULL, THREE SISTERS)

Summary/Abstract: A provincial place, far from cultural centres, where the flashes of culture and its flows in large urban centres hardly even reach, as well as aristocratic nests, are the most common locations where great Russian prose, novels, stories, short stories, dramas take place. This is true of works such as "Stories of Bielkin", "Dubrovsky" and "The Captain's Daughter" by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the novel "Dead Souls" by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, as well as his famous play "The Government Inspector", and the novel "Who is to blame?" by Alexander Ivanovich Herzen. Provincial motifs and events are also described through presentations of the so-called noble nests, which were mostly depicted as places of stagnation of Russian society with the slow passage of time. A similar example is represented by numerous novels by Turgenev, with the exception of the novel "Smoke", as well as almost all the dramatic works of Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky, Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov, and Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky. The locations of Fyodor Mihajlovich Dostoyevsky's novels "Evil Souls" and "The Brothers Karamazov", Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's plays "The Seagull" and "Three Sisters" are based on the same spatial coordinates. All these works have a common denominator, contained in the description of the palanquin mentality and fate of frustrated heroes. They are condemned to a kind of social slavery on the palanquin borders, remaining hopelessly trapped in the province outside the current social trends. Therefore, these works represented a kind of literary version of the question: "Where is Russian society going with such slowed-down forms of palanquin consciousness and life in general?". And thus, at the global level, a crucial question was raised, which was only reflected over the image of the Russian palanquin: "Where is Russian society as a whole going?". Thus, the Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries is imbued with the themes of the Russian provinces as an integral part of the view of the current time and the life of the Russian people far from the cultural centres, with a distant echo of events in the metropolises, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Therefore, these achievements were a sign of clear warnings about the cultural and social backwardness of Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries. The focus of a number of writers on topics about the Russian province, on grotesque images of a sleeping palanquin and petty-bourgeois mentality, on the flourishing of pettybourgeois manners, filled with social vices and a feeling of being lost in the Russian latitudes, is of a multiple nature. It should also be emphasized the fact that provincial themes and motifs were attractive to Russian readers from large urban areas in the period, for whom the Russian province represented an exotic space as a kind of "terra incognita". At the same time, the themes of the Russian province with all its grotesque images and deviations, with social anomalies and vices, represented for writers a kind of very suitable literary shield from repressive state censorship. In this way, they focused their global critical views, aimed at Russian society as a whole, on satirical descriptions of the provinces, metaphorically clearly pointing out the similarity between the provinces and the metropolis. That is why the provincial sketches represented clear allusions to the state of Russian society as a whole, independent of the provincial or metropolitan milieu. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol in his powerful satirical comedy "The Government Inspector" collected the entire spectrum of social anomalies in one provincial place, like Russia in miniature, but by setting the action in a provincial atar, he provided his dramatic reading with a kind of protective cover from censorship. At the same time, there are clear allusions that the petty bourgeoisie is present as a feature of Russian society in the 19th century at all social addresses and levels. Thus, in a satirical tone, Gogol succeeded in portraying, in fact, the complete bureaucratic and corrupt Russia of the 1830s. In the plays of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the satirical tone is not dominant, as in "The Government Inspector" by N. V. Gogol. In Chekhov's "The Seagull" as well as in the melodramatically colored drama "Three Sisters", with all the signs of the province, there is a kind of echo of the Weltschmerz of the era of the German Romantics. This is precisely why this global feeling of loss and failure is transformed in Chekhov's lyrical drama into a kind of "Russian pain" of the dramatic characters. Such heroes in "The Seagull" are especially Treplev and Nina Zarechna, who are condemned to anonymity and prosaic pictures of the province. At the same time, they have a strong sense of fruitless longing for the big city and the lights of the big stages, being aware that they will never realize their utopian wishes. In the drama "Three Sisters", as a leitmotif, the longing of the provincial characters for the great city as an eternal goal and a place of salvation echoes. The suffering for Moscow, as the "promised land", for the area towards which the roads from the provinces are most often closed, remains as a yearning echo, with no hope that the dream of living in a big metropolis will come true. Therefore, Irina's suffering through a kind of cry ("To Moscow!") speaks of the omnipresent, collective feeling of the curse of the provincial environment, in which the heroes of the aforementioned drama are condemned to an eternal prosaic existence on the margins of social events. By their behaviour, they only show that they feel a personal rebellion, but that kind of fruitless rebellion, which will never turn into a concrete action and a definitive escape from the petty-bourgeois environment, which shackles all their greatest desires and expectations. In this way, the palanquin becomes another name for the labyrinth from which the voices of protest can be heard, which will never result in success. The position of a provincial town as a setting in Russian literature, especially in the works of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol and Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, determines both the plot lines and the forms of behaviour of numerous heroes, the mental mannerisms and characters of the characters. Therefore, the spatial meaning in the background of the action, as an essential moment of the selected reality, affects the development of the entire plot. The selection of a provincial place and its heroes, inextricably linked to the environment in which they exist, gives the writer the opportunity to create a text with the characteristic features and stamp of small urban environments. Province and provincial, at the level of type, typological pattern, are in constant correlation, complementing each other like a reflection in a mirror. Some characters, of course, naturally merge with their social environment, because they are based in the palanquin milieu, and derive from it with its social patterns of behaviour, while others, who are at a higher level, feel the curse of small environments and the desire to go to cities as centres of cultural and social events. At the same time, they are aware that such a Copernican turn will, in fact, never happen, because they do not have enough strength for such a thing. But at least, as an intermediate solution, they have a negative, repulsive attitude towards the palanquin way of life, at the same time with the desire to lament their fates and hopelessness until the end of their existence. The cultural identification of the phenomenon of space with the concept of personality gives the possibility to establish a whole new direction of scientific research of the image of the province in Russian literature. Therefore, in this paper, we tried to shed light on the issue of the complex description of the province, both with its positive and negative connotations. And this means that we shed light on the symbolism of the province as a concept, on the structure of its multi-layered, often grotesque image. At the same time, we focused our attention on small provincial towns, villages, noble estates and Russian nature in order to form a judgment about the concept of personality at the centre of dramatic and prose plots and events. That is why, in the light of the interpretation of the image of the Russian province, we started from the point of view that its eternal role as a secondary cultural space, devoid of dynamics, true value criteria and creative advances, should not be viewed unilaterally. This is precisely why we came to a certain number of conclusions, according to which the myth of a distant province, as exclusively a place where boredom and monotony reign, becomes relative, because the spatial, that is, the geographical position of distance from large cultural centres, may or may not it must represent a starting point for a complex picture of apathetic social environments, as well as for a complete characterization of personality In any case, the concept of the perception of "place", that is, the interaction of space and man, has become one of the approaches in the process of studying the literary text and in the case of the interaction of the province and its inhabitants as psychological profiles of small places. In the aesthetic experience of man and his environment, as a process of identification, the methodological approach of researching the image of the province in Russian culture is increasingly being established in the science of literature. In this way, the image of the province is defined as an object of sociological, cultural and literary study. In addition, the interpretation of the term province and the literary character of the provincial is particularly significant in relation to the geographical belonging to the area of the province itself, as well as in relation to the status of provincial consciousness, which in practice results in petty-bourgeois norms and forms of behaviour, bearing in mind not only provincial but also larger urban environments, including metropolitan ones. In relation to the influence of space, i.e. the provincial environment and mentality in the poetics of Gogol ("The Auditor") and Chekhov ("Three Sisters" and "The Seagull"), we highlighted the fact to what extent and in what ways a sociologically and culturally limited space can influence human psychology and his behaviour. So, to his inferior position in relation to the metropolitan environment, which for him takes on the dimensions of an "unrealized dream", although, as we have already stated, relapses of petty-bourgeois consciousness and behaviour are recognizable even in highly urban environments as a legacy of the past and life in the provinces. It is about the archetypal images of the provincial consciousness of all those who, having come to the major centres, kept their original views on reality under the seal of petty-bourgeois consciousness and established habits. At the end of this comprehensive overview of the issue we are dealing with, it is worth highlighting certain differences in terms of describing the atmosphere of the province in the works of Gogol and Chekhov. Although there is already a well-known opinion that all realists "came out of Gogol's Overcoat", the descriptions of the province in "The Government Inspector" by N.V. Gogol and A.P. Chekhov are given from three angles. The satirical images in "The Government Inspector" have a corresponding echo in Chekhov's satirical novellas and short stories, which clearly reflect the aforementioned attitude that Chekhov himself "came out of Gogol's overcoat". The curse of the provincial way of life, in which low passions, vanity, conformism, primitivism, race for armchairs, poltergeism, duplicity and other negative determinants of the petty-bourgeois environment, represent satirical tracts and images of human flaws and vices, certainly characteristic of the entire Russian society of that era vertically. However, Gogol created archetypal images and a gallery of universal characters, recognizable not only at every time in Russia, but at all times and in all countries of the world. It is precisely for this reason that Gogol's work ranks high on the qualitative scale of the entire history of Russian literature, and reflections of his satirical approach are also noticeable in other literatures, up to the works of B. Nushic. Gogol collected all the ugly sides of the social milieu in the provincial environment, and under the shield, as we have already mentioned, of stories about the middle-class environment, he created eternal pictures of every human society as a whole in the synchronic and diachronic plane, both of the province and of all large urban environments. Bearing in mind the three different dramatic images in Gogol's "The Government Inspector" and Chekhov's dramas "The Seagull" and "Three Sisters", we can conclude that there are three crucial approaches when describing everyday life in small environments: either in the satirical mosaic of Gogol's scenes, or through Chekhov's melodramatically coloured tragic destinies of his characters in a state of prolonged frustration, which coloured their lives bounded by the borders of the province as a kind of seal as a sign of insurmountable obstacles towards large social environments as symbols of civic affirmation or as a sign of tragically missed desires in the sphere of art.

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