Russian Classics in the “Serious” Prose of “Russian Jerome” (About Three Works by Ivan Shcheglov)

The beginning of the 1890s is one of the most significant but hitherto understudied period in the literary biography of the prose writer and playwright Ivan Shcheglov (literary pseudonym of Ivan L. Leontiev; 1856–1911), a contemporary and friend of A. Chekhov. At this time, the writer tried to move from humor and vaudeville, which brought him income and success, to lager forms and more serious topics. The author of the article pays special attention to the hidden and explicit presence of three Russian classics (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy) in the intertextual layer of three works by Shcheglov. These are two closely related stories, Near the Truth and The Decline of the Soul, as well as the unfinished novel A Million Torments, which was influenced by Jerome K. Jerome. (At the end of his life Shcheglov was called the “Russian Jerome.”) The most interesting case is the interweaving of the lines of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the plot and system of images of the story Near the Truth (1892), which, in its ideological task, was directed against the Tolstoyans. One of the main characters of the story (Alexei Kuvyazev) not only has a “portrait” resemblance to V.G. Chertkov but is also a kind of reincarnation of Nikolai Stavrogin from Dostoevsky’s novel Demons. Turning to the works of the early 1890s allows us to come to the conclusion that for Shcheglov this was not a period of decline (as was commonly thought in literary criticism) but on the contrary the pinnacle of his work