https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyQFrAEcke4
This video exposes, to some extent,
individual responses to the literary figures, and serves as an example of the
countless possible illustrations of the social functions of literature. It combines the two stories of the two monuments, two writers,
and two cultures in one city, representing a nice harmony between monument,
human and culture. Fast-moving and humorous the video captures the manipulation
of public opinion, but also informs
viewers of the two great authors whose texts provide cathartic relief in
times of stress.
Cultural notes. Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, is located aproximately 40 km from the Russian
border, and it is a part of the Russian-Ukrainian historical borderland. Here,
in Kharkiv, two languages and two cultures coexist, however Russian is a language most frequently seen and heard in the city. As an educational center Kharkiv still is
Russian-dominated, although now the university professors who spent much of
their career as traditional Russian-speaking professionals are willing and really
do make efforts to achieve the
linguistic comptence to teach in Ukrainian.
The Kharkiv National University has been a center of
education in Slobodskaya Ukraine since its foundation in 1805. The scholars of
the humanities from Kharkiv University, such as O. Potebnya, D. Ovsyanyko-Kulikovsky,
I. Sreznevsky L.Bulakhovsky, Yu. Shevelyov had worked in the fields of general linguistics,
Russian and Ukrainian langauge, ethnography, psychology of creativity,
pshycolinguistics and made a significant contribution to the world philology.
Represantatives of Kharkiv School of Psychology conducted research within the
framework of Lev Vygotsky’s theories.
The
best Russia’s poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
(1799-1837) was born in Moscow. On his mother's side, notoriously, there was a
great-grandfather, an African page from Cameroon, purchased in Constantinople's
slave market as a gift for Peter the Great, who grew up to marry a Swede and
become a general. Graduating from the
privileged school near St.Petersburg,
Pushkin served as a collegial secretary of the 10th rank at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. Having been educated
according to the best standards of West European
culture, Pushkin strove for new social forms of life. He was involved in
groups where political liberals debated reforms and constitutions. In 1820, when several of his
anti-authoritarian poems came to the attention of Tsar Alexander I, he
was sent to exile to South Russia, under the guise of an administrative
transfer in the service. With the aid of influential friends, he was
transferred in July 1823 to Odessa. In 1831, Pushkin married to Natalia
Goncharova, arguably the most beautiful woman in Russia, and settled down in
St. Petersburg. In
1837, amidst rumors that his wife had started a scandalous affair, Pushkin
challenged her alleged lover, his brother in-law Georges d’Anthes, to a duel,
which left Pushkin mortally injured. He died two days later. Judging by his critical
articles, historical works and his letters, nothing seemed to escape his notice, or to be beyond his
grasp. Pushkin’s
brilliant intelligence, sharpness of his opinion and versatility of his poetic talent are demonstrated in a
number of his masterpieces – in early romantic poems, such as Caucasian Captive (1820-21) and the Fountain of
Bakhchisarai (1821-23), Poltava (1828),
play Boris Godunov (1824-25), also in his later works Mozart
and Salieri, Avaricious Knight, the Bronze
Horseman (1833). Pshycological realism of his prose in Shot (1830), unfinished
Dubrovsky (1832-33), a romantic story Queen of Spades (1830) has
been estimated both in Russia and in the West. The diversity of indomitable figures
of Russian history is presented in his historical novels, such as his
unfinished Moor of Peter the Great (1828), History of the Pugachev’s
Rebellion (1833-34), Captain’s Daughter (1836). And, of course, no
one better than Pushkin in his poem Eugene Onegin (1823-31) discovered and measured all the
depths of desparate, gleeful, suffering, generous and confused Russian soul.
Nikolai
Vasilievich Gogol
(1809-1852), known as one of Russia’s greatest comic writers and master prose
stylists, was born in Ukraine. In 1828,
he moved to St. Petersburg; and after a short term work as a minor
civil servant and failure as an assistant lecturer of world history at the
University of St. Petersburg Gogol became a full time writer. Evenings on a
Farm near Dikanka, published in
1831-32, promoted him from obscurity to a position as one of the
nation's leading young writers. In this collection, Gogol melded his Cossack
background with the fantastic and macabre. Next, he published the collection Mirgorod
(1835), which includes the novella Old-World
Landowners about the decay of the old way of life and the famous historical
tale Taras Bulba based on the sketches of Ukrainian Cossacks. The cycle of
short stories that were collectively called The
St. Petersburg Tales showed Gogol as a mature writer shaping the outlandish
fantastic elements of his earlier stories into a more subtle and effective depiction
of the strangeness of an inhuman urban environment. Chief among them is The Overcoat (1842), the doleful story
of an impoverished government clerk who saves to buy a new winter overcoat only
to have it stolen the first day he wears it as he walks home from a party
honoring his precious acquisition. In 1836, Gogol composed the play The
Inspector General based upon an anecdote allegedly recounted to Gogol by Alexander Pushkin. The play tells the
simple tale of a young civil servant, Khlestakov, who is mistaken by the local
officials in a small provincial town to be a government inspector visiting
their province incognito. Khlestakov happily adapts to his new role and
exploits the situation. With this simple plot, Gogol masterfully creates a satirical phantasmagoria of Tsarist Russia. Shortly
after the premier of his play Gogol fled Russia. Except for short visits,
Gogol lived abroad for thirteen years. He visited Germany, Switzerland, and
France and then settled in Rome. There, he wrote the first part of his major
work, Dead Souls. Gogol claimed that the plot for Dead Souls (1842) was again suggested by Pushkin in a conversation
in 1835. The novel, which brilliantly satirizes the greed, corruption, falsity
and general banality of upper-class Russian provincial life, depicts the
adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov.
Having arrived in a provincial town to buy “dead souls” –serfs who had
died but were still counted as living until the next census, Chichikov met with
local landowners and schemes to buy their deceased serfs from them so he can apply
for a government bank loan using the "souls" as collateral. Gogol
spent a few years fitfully working on part two of Dead Souls but despite
repeated efforts, he failed to complete it. He died in Moscow
in 1852.