Representation of a career of a mass-fiction writer in D.V. Grigorovich's novel “Country roads”

In the late 1840s, D.V Grigorovich, like many of his contemporaries, turns to the plot associated with the career of a fiction writer. Often such a plot suggested negative scenarios associated with the spiritual or physical death of a young dreamer. The article shows the influence of the plot scheme of “Lost Illusions” by O. Balzac, and the concept of “The Human Comedy” on the concept of the works “Failures” and “Country Roads”. In particular, in Grigorovich’s prose, literature and painting are understood as a thing and a commodity, the economic properties of which are primary in relation to the aesthetic ones. The appendix contains a register of works conceived but not realized by the writer, which testify to the influence of Balzac on the plot of the Russian writer. While working on the first novel in his career, Country Roads, Grigor-ovich focused on examples of English novelism (Charles Dickens’ prose) and Gogol’s “Dead Souls”, but he refused the prophetic pathos of his predecessors. Focusing on plot patterns, Grigorovich at the same time built the “novel without intrigue” he called on the principle of a feuilleton novel. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the story of the novice writer Apollon Egorevich Dryankov, a homemaker in the house of influential provincial landowners. The article considers the possibility of combining different personalities in one hero: Egor Dryansky, Apollon Grigoriev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and, finally, Grigorovich himself. Based on the title of the novel “The Unrecognized Turkey”, we make attempt to show possible interpretations and trajectories of reading this work (The last of Mohicans, Indiana, Ugly Ducky and Poor Folk), and also shows possible contacts between the author and his hero in the text. The article was prepared for the 200th anniversary of Grigorovich and the 170th anniversary of the first publication of the novel “Country Roads”.