Flaubert’s allusions in the creations of G. Gazdanov

The present study is devoted to the images of episodic characters in Gaito Gazdanov’s work that were styled after the main character of G. Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Soul” (“Un cœur simple”). The characters marked by the features similar to those of Felicite appear in many of the young émigré writer’s works of the 1920s and 1930s: they include the maid and the cook from the novel “Vecher u Kler” (“Evening at Claire's”), the cook from the story “Vecherniy sputnik” (“Evening Companion”) and a number of characters from “Nochnye dorogi” (“Night Roads”). The motifs of constantly shifting affections, absent-mindedness, thoughtfulness, “frozen” age, peasant origin and “woodenness” as a symbol of frozen immobility, bourgeoisness, “geographical cretinism,” etc. In some images, the intertextual layers are overlayed: in addition to Flaubert’s, this is the reception of the “Leninist cook,” who “must learn to manage the state” (as a symbol of the “substitution” of social roles and social timelessness). The images of Fedorchenko and Suzanne from “Nochnye dorogi” (“Night Roads”) intertwine the features of Flaubert’s “simple soul” Felicity and her “sister” Dushechka, as interpreted by Chekhov. (We have previously shown that the heroine of A. P. Chekhov’s story “Dushechka” was their literary prototype.) Thus, Gazdanov emphasizes that he felt the kinship between the characters of the French and Russian writers. The deciphering key to understanding Flaubert’s intertext in Gazdanov was the phrase from the dialogue about the cook in “Vecherniy sputnik” (“Evening Companion”): “I should write a book about her.” Here the subject of the author’s interest is fully revealed, its similarity to Flaubert’s understanding of the literary hero - the hero of any social class, worthy of becoming the subject of the author’s image. Gazdanov not only agrees with the French writer, but offers his own vision: all of the characters in question are addicted to alcohol. The heroes’ excessive drinking is their tragedy: alcoholic oblivion becomes a way for the everyman hero to endure mental suffering, to fill the emptiness of existence. This is Gazdanov’s interpretation of the very demand of a simple soul for feelings, depicted in Flaubert’s short story.