Image of a modern man in the middle-class environment of the provincial city N: prototypes of the character from N. D. Khvoschinskaya’s essay "At the photographer’s" (1879)

The article analyzes the essay «At the Photographer's» from the cycle «Album. Groups and Portraits» (1879) by the writer of the second half of the 19th century N. D. Khvoschinskaya, which presents a generalized character of a «moneymaker» as one of the typical representatives of provincial philistinism. Based on archival and historical documents, we have made assumptions about its prototypes and the similarity of the images in works by N. D. Khvoschinskaya and A. I. Kuprin. The proceedings of scientific conferences and special literature help us to determine the possible initial locations of descriptions of the life in the provincial city N. We have stressed the topics of disappearance of ideals and moral decadency, devaluation of femininity, which are relevant to N. D. Khvoschinskaya's prose of the 1870s, described the noble-bourgeois culture of provincial Ryazan, and revealed the architectonics of the author's creative method in creating the images of characters.