W świecie dusz „ukradzionych”. Olega Bogajewa czytanie Gogola

Abstract

This article analyzes Oleg Bogayev’s play Bashmachkin. The Miracle of the Overcoat in One Act, a postmodern remake of Nikolai Gogol’s canonical short story The Overcoat. The author of the article points out that Bogayev is consistently breaking binary oppositions in the depiction of the fictional world and maximizing the strategy of play, for instance, pushing the category of subjectivity to the limits of absurdity. Bogayev preserves and reinterprets the main elements of Gogol’s story (theft, the semantics of the overcoat, the protagonist’s death), modifying the structure and composition of the original, introducing a plethora of new characters, and brutalizing the depicted world through the escalation of violence. By retelling the story of the “little man” Akaky Akakievich, the author perceives him as a realization of the archetype of Russian consciousness (the Russian man). He highlights the moral and psychological consequences of escapism and the traumatic, destructive role of violence. The specificity of Bogayev’s dialogue with the classics takes the form of a feedback loop, combining a view of contemporary reality through the lens of the classics with a view of the classics from the perspective of the present, revealing both the relevance and the universality of the themes addressed by Gogol.