Three stages of recognition and crowning. On the history of Gogol’s first jubilees

The article deals with the phenomenology of the writer’s jubilee. The objects of the research are three jubilee stages of Gogol’s posthumous biography: the 50 th anniversary of the author’s famous work, the 50 th anniversary of the author’s death and the 100 th anniversary of his birth. The author of the article refers to the unique account of the eyewitness of these jubilees celebrations, the writer Ivan Tscheglow who offered his classification of writers’ jubilees based on the recent high-flown jubilees of A.S. Pushkin and N.V. Gogol’. The first writers’ jubilees he set on three stages called as the following: «aesthetic», «pedagogic», and «democratic». The author of the article corroborates the opinion of Tscheglow and illustrates it with the unique documents - the scripts of celebrations in provinces and capitals, the minute records of jubilee meetings, and the catalogues of exhibitions. The conclusion made by the author is that every jubilee is both consecutive recognition and appropriation of the writer’s name by the intellectuals, scientific community, authorities, nation, clergy, cities and countries. Every next jubilee of the writer is the act of his «appropriation» as his name gets the air of «brand», which is used for ideological, political and commercial purposes.