Ivan Goncharov’s creative legacy in modern literary studies (on a scientific monograph)

These days, Russian Goncharov studies (the scientific works devoted to Ivan Goncharov) are characterized by two aspects of their development. On the one hand, the traditional approach, focused on studying the ideological outline of the writer’s works, retains its strength and significance. On the other hand, there is a noticeable desire to identify new vectors of classical heritage research by either searching for a new methodological program or systematizing the fully mastered material at a qualitatively new level of understanding. It is this second way of understanding the artistic world of Ivan Goncharov that was adopted in the recent (2024) scientific monograph “The Poetics of Non-novel Prose by I. A. Goncharov”, written by Gulzada Bagautdinova, a lecturer at Mari State University (Yoshkar-Ola), and published in the printing house of the named educational institution (its volume is 296 pages). This article is a detailed review of the book. The review notes the undeniably positive aspects of the research interpretation of Ivan Goncharov’s “non-novel prose” (its “ornamentation”, a special rhythmic pattern that manifests itself both at the level of purely linguistic means of expressing thought and at the level of the general organization of the meaningful and semantic parts of an “unromantic” genre work, the cumulative “effect” with its folklore basis, etc.). The article emphasizes the importance of the specifically empirical approach, which is the texts of medium and small epic form, created by the author of “Oblomov” in the period from the 1830s to the 1890s. The monograph takes into account a significant layer of works on Ivan Goncharov (those past and present), its concept is logically presented in a coherent manner, interesting and quite convincing interpretations of Goncharov’s works are given based on “immanent” poetics, quantitativestatistical tables and fundamental conceptual-terminological tools are placed in appendices. The review discusses polemical aspects of conceptual constructions, which are inevitable in any major monograph. G. Bagautdinova’s book about Ivan Goncharov is undoubtedly a milestone in the development of Russian Goncharov studies.

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