Gogol or Dostoevsky: On the Main Pretext of Nikolay Erdman’s Play “The Suicide”

Nikolai Erdman’s friend Mikhail Bulgakov once called him “the Sukhovo-Kobylin of the 20th century.” There are certainly sufficient grounds for this comparison. However, he could equally well be called “the Gogol of the 20th century.” Erdman’s dramatic legacy has already revealed many corrobo rations of this idea of him. Particularly indicative in this regard is his famous play “The Suicide” (1928), which was never staged during the playwright’s lifetime. The nature of the creative dialogue between Nikolai Erdman and Nikolai Gogol in this play is the subject of the first section of this article. Howe ver, Erdman owes the central conflict of his play not to Gogol, but to Dostoev sky. This idea is expressed in the article through numerous textual comparisons. On the one hand, they confirm and illustrate the significant intertextual connections of Erdman’s famous play with one of the most famous novels of Dostoevsky’s “Great Pentateuch.” On the other hand, they are intended to reveal the nature of Erdman’s creative refraction of this “Dostoevsky” theme within the framework of his dramatic work. Apparently, this refraction has a multi faceted and multi-aspect nature. It includes the stylization of one character (Fedya Pitunin) as Kirillov (and partly, apparently, as Smerdyakov), and the travesty of Kirillov in the image of Podsekalnikov. At the same time, it seems that the internal affirmation by Dostoevsky himself of the ideal of “living life” latent in “Demons” is reproduced in the image of Podsekalnikov through his comically played-up love of life. When juxtaposed with Kirillov, Semyon Se myonovich does not in any way contradict the artistic logic of the creator of this image. So, despite all of Podsekalnikov’s parody of Kirillov, Erdman only seems to negate Dostoevsky, but in essence, internally identifies with him.