“Failed life” by Dmitry Grigorovich: towards the pragmatics of the fictional text

Abstract

In the early 1850s, political processes made the fiction of the journal “Otechestvennye Zapiski” change towards a compromise and numerous agreements between the author, the publisher, and the censor. One example is the story “Failures” (later “Failed life”) by Dmitry Grigorovich, which combines the techniques and ideas of the stories of Nikolai Gogol (“Portrait”) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (“Poor people,” “Weak heart,” “White nights”). In Russian literary criticism, this story is regarded as secondary and imitative, studied mainly in the context of other stories about artists projected onto the everyday life of the drawing classes of the Academy of Arts. This paper shows that while being the key view, such an interpretation cannot be the only one. When discovering a new talent, his ascent and death, one can see the scenario realized by many contemporaries of Grigorovich, notably by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Later, Grigorovich revised the story by changing idioms and narration style to give it a new title: “Failed life.” The revision pragmatics is obvious: “Failures” are more local, marking an episode or a chain of a person’s life (or a set of situations in the fiction plot). “Failed Life” echoes a global catastrophe, with its traces clearly seen in the text of “Literary memoirs” and the writer’s later epistolary. This paper has been prepared for the 200th anniversary of Grigorovich, whose literary heritage still requires commentary and research reflection. The appendix provides a letter from Dmitry Grigorovich addressed to Andrew Kraevsky, the publisher of “Otechestvennye zapiski”.