Abstract
The world which Turgenev and Gogol entered at the beginning of the nineteenth century was rapidly changing. The process which was taking place in Russia can be compared with what was happening in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Russia at the end of the nineteenth century was, like Britain at the turn of the sixteenth, between two worlds — between feudalism and capitalism, between one sense of identity and another, between native traditions and those more broadly European, between a sense (somewhat idealized) of community and one of assertive individualism.
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Notes and References
N. V. Gogol, ‘Petersburg Notes of 1836’, Russian Literature Triquarterly, VII (Winter 1974) 178.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia’, in H. Hardy and A. Kelly (eds) Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979) p. 11.
Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Avon Books, 1967) p. 121.
Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979) p. 146.
Marc Slonim, An Outline of Russian Literature (Oxford University Press, 1958) p. 87.
Vsevolod Setchkarev, Gogol: His Life and Works (London: Peter Owen, 1965) p. 122.
Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976) pp. 26–7.
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© 1982 Nick Worrall
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Worrall, N. (1982). Two Worlds. In: Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16917-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16917-7_2
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