E-mail: welt20062@yandex.ru
Tel.: +7 (831) 433-82-45
23, Gagarina av., Nizhniy Novgorod, 603950, Russian Federation
Full Professor (Philology), head of the Russian Literature Department,
Lobachevskiy State University of Nizhniy Novgorod — National Research University
I’m pleased to express my gratitude to Yu. S. Lanskaya for her valuable advices concerning the problem of the “urban legend” term proliferation in Western scholarship.
The paper characterizes connotations which the concept of an “urban legend” contains in Russian culture. It is demonstrated, in particular, that some specific shades of this concept are elaborated in ethnography, folklore, memoirs and fiction literature of the 19th — the 20th centuries. In addition, the article analyzes a short story “Doctor Koshchunskiy’s theory”, authored by a novelist N. D. Pavlov (1855–1908), who has got almost forgotten nowadays. The analysis determined that this literary artwork, despite the definition as an “urban legend”, proposed by the author, is not exhausted by the presence of supernatural and mystical motifs, bound to the urban space. It is possible to trace N. D. Pavlov’s explicit desire to engage in an extramural polemic against nihilistic and vulgarmaterialist ideas, which were not capable, from his point of view, to give the universal key to a comprehensive understanding of reality and pounding puzzled schematic thinking. Along with this, the article demonstrates that some elements of Pavlov’s story have parallels in Russian folklore (oral mythological stories about household deities) and contemporary massculture (narratives about poltergeists). Analogy between one of the episodes of “Doctor Koshchunskiy’s theory” with “The Picture оf Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde is an issue of particular interest.
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