Path to Viy: features of the artistic conflict

Abstract

The author undertakes a study of the symbolic-religious conflict, a man and Viy, as a structural and content basis for the integrity of the novella Viy . In Gogol's “paradoxical negative realism”, the “squabbling of life” is depicted from an eschatological perspective. The heterogeneity of the conflict is predetermined by the heterogeneity of Gogol's vision of life: behind the vulgar relations of vulgar people, an existential world, invisible to the characters, shines through, in which an irreal enemy awaits a person in order not to allow this person to avoid meeting with himself. The basis of the conflict of the novella Viy is the subterranean phenomena of the universe, which are at different stages of accepting evil. The mutual negation of the vulgarity of evil (Khoma) and the fantasy of supernatural evil (Viy) does not seem to Gogol absolute, just as the scenario of their movement towards each other does not seem impossible. Analysis of the conflict allows us to assert that Gogol, as a “prophet and philosopher of Orthodox culture”, according to V. Zenkovsky's definition, declares himself already in the story of 1834, and Russian literature owes the “implantation of the religious theme” to this particular work.