The marriage plot in Gogol's Petersburg

This article explores the marriage plot involving both the elder and younger couples embodied in the six stories of “The Evenings on Farm Near Dikanka”. The elder couple, comic or “scary”, sometimes incomplete, embodies the violation of the norm. The younger couple is supposed to restore the norm by renewing the story successfully. However, only the blacksmith's adventures in “Christmas Eve” happen to reach the finale in question. The other five stories give different variations of distorting the iconic “correct” development of the marriage plot. In “St. Petersburg Stories” the elder couple is marginalized yet complete, whereas the younger generation is presented via the succession of bachelors (Pirogov, Piskarev, Kovalev, Chertkov, Poprostchin, Bashmachkin). Women in St. Petersburg seem to resemble cossack's daughter from “Viy” rather than the female characters “The Evenings”. They are unwanted or couldn't be married. This evolution of the marriage plot is related to Gogol's historical views. The reputation of St. Petersburg created by Gogol emerged in the context of disputes about the two capitals. These disputes were the manifestations of preferences given either to The Muscovite Russia or the one reformed by Peter the Great. By creating the whole procession of bachelors taking the leading parts in “St. Petersburg Stories”, with the ugly elder couples in the background, Gogol demonstrated the impossibility of restoring the norm which had happened in the conditional past of the so-called “Little Russia”. But it is impossible in St. Petersburg. It is no coincidence that the lifespan of totally unmarriageable Ivan Fedorovich Shponka covers the St. Petersburg period of the Russian history. Neither is the fact that the comedy fully devoted to the failed wedding is set in St. Petersburg.