“Following the Fatal Question”

The article examines two remarks to the article by N. N. Strakhov “The Fatal Question” (1863): “From Travel Memories of Polonism” (1867) and “Political Conversation with the Poles” (1870). Both texts appeared on the pages of the new periodicals “World Work” and “Zarya”, following the traditions of the magazines “Moskvityanin”, “Vremya” and “Epoch”. Despite the difference in editorial tactics and strategies, it can be stated that in both cases the monologue discourse of the original article was transferred into a dialogic channel and staged, arranged as a conversation on a train. Thus, the arguments presented by Strakhov were presented in essays, skits and impromptu interviews for propaganda purposes. At the end of the article, a hypothesis is put forward about the attribution of the two texts under consideration Strakhov, and also a hypothesis is put forward about the semiotics of behavior, determined by the addition and commenting on a previously completed work, which brought disappointment and trauma to its creator. In this case, the defining figure in this model was and remains Gogol, the author of The Government Inspector, who felt an urgent need to convey to the reader the innermost thing he was trying to express. Of course, with each new iteration, Gogol moved further and further away from the position of the author, expressing the voice of a non-trivial and exceptional reader. A similar paradox was associated with Dead Souls. Strakhov, as some pages of his biography show, was prone to resentment, and the ban on his article, as well as the closure of the “Vremya” magazine, was experienced by him as an insult to his honor and dignity, a doubt thrown into the public arena in his competence and objectivity. Using a stable plot situation of a conversation on a train, Strakhov, experiencing the catastrophe that befell the original text (in his eyes, practically The Government Inspector), created his variations of Theatrical Passage. However, the difference was that the critic and publicist Kositsa was never able to go beyond the limits of speculative journalism built on the manipulation of public opinion. In this he differed from his brilliant interlocutors – Dostoevsky and Tolstoy – whose artistic texts, by no means limited to roadside conversations about the fateful questions of modernity, demonstrated a breakthrough to the transcendental

Biography · Conceptualization · Conversation · Dialogic · Disappointment · Headline · Ideology · Impromptu · Semiotics · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · European Cultural and National Identity · Soviet and Russian History