Literary ‘daguerreotypes’ of the Maikov family: the story ‘Evil illness’ by Ivan Goncharov and a friendly caricature ‘So they rented a dacha!’ by Vladimir Solonitsyn

The article is devoted to the study of two parody literary texts - Evil Illness by Ivan Goncharov and So They Rented a Dacha! by Vladimir Solonitsyn. Both texts relate to the creation of the image of the Maikov family and its members. Both Goncharov and Solonitsyn were closely connected with a family where advanced aesthetic problems of the transitional period of the 1840s, these reflecting the struggle between romanticism and realism, were discussed and embodied in works of art and literature. The friendly parodies by Goncharov and Solonitsyn are united by focus on the romantic worldview of the heroes, the prototypes of which were the members of the Maikov family (Ekaterina Maikova, Nikolai Maikov, etc.). In his first story, Goncharov addressed the main aesthetic conflict of the era using the aesthetics of the Flemish school of painting, since ‘Flemishism’, along with the traditions of High Italian painting, embodies the essence of Goncharov’s aesthetic category zhivopisaniye (which can be translated as depiction, vivid depiction). Goncharov’s ‘Flemishism’ as his style feature manifested itself already at the beginning of his literary path (Evil Illness) in the form of extreme penchant for details, attention to the beauty of everyday life, humorous elements in the description of everyday scenes. Sketches of everyday life in Goncharov’s first story are consonant with the theme of the painting by Adriaen van Ostade Tavern Scene. In addition to the parodic, ironic content, Goncharov’s story is associated with the synthesis of the ‘sophisticated’ and the ‘everyday’, and not a one-sided manifestation of life in art. In this regard, Flemish painters were extremely important for the novice writer Goncharov, who later became close to the ‘natural school’ of Vissarion Belinsky that proclaimed depiction of ‘the beautiful in the ordinary’ to be the main task of Russian literature.