Estate and village in the story of G.I. Chulkov “Red stallion” (1921-1922)

The article analyzes the topic of the short story “Red Stallion” (1921- 1922) by the symbolist writer G.I. Chulkov, soon after the Civil War in Russia. In his works of the military-revolutionary years (journalism, criticism, poetry and fiction), Chulkov tried to understand the changes taking place in the country and, if possible, toinfluence them based on his liberal-patriotic beliefs. The writer contemplates the fate of Russia as a unity of “land” and “people”, the tragic rupture of which in the revolutionary era he stated after D.S. Merezhkovsky, M.A. Voloshin, M.M. Prishvin and others. “Red Stallion” describes not just the worthlessness of the peasants who came to plunder the landowner’s estate as a symbol of “high” culture, but conveys in detail the atmosphere of devilry in the Russian village of 1919. The culmination of the story is a desperate gallop of the master’s stallion brutally set on fire by the peasants, symbolizing the second apocalyptic horse. Although the myth of the Russian “people-Godbearer” goes back to F.M. Dostoevsky, it is obviously shaken in Chulkov’s eyes, the idea of the sanctity of Russia remains unshakable, since the second component of the concept of the Motherland - “land” - preserves it in full. The “sin” of the village people, according to Chulkov, is largely due to the rejection of the system of life on the landowner’s estate as an outpost of the best features of Christian Europeanism in Russia: the value of the human being and respect for the law. However, the “Russian land” itself, which united both the estate and the village in its bosom - is the guardian of “holiness” and the pledge of the revival of Russia.