The novel “Brother and Sister” by N. G. Pomyalovsky: intratextual literary reception in raznochintsy prose

The aim of the research is to identify the constructive elements of the plot and characterology of the literature preceding and contemporary to N. G. Pomyalovsky, which served as material for creating the novel within the aesthetic and ideological paradigm of the real school. Pomyalovsky’s unfinished novel “Brother and Sister”, the textual features of its publication by N. A. Blagoveshchensky, the conception, and compositional features are analyzed. The plot situations and characters of the novel are considered, the basis of which are the plot collisions and heroes of the works of Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Turgenev, which served as Pomyalovsky’s peculiar pretexts. The forms of artistic reception of previous and contemporary literature are identified, and the techniques of “remodeling” the source material, which became both the basis and the starting point for creating new approaches to depicting the life of society in the spirit of Chernyshevsky’s real school, are considered. The scientific originality of the study is determined by the comparative method, which makes it possible to identify the literary potential of the “old school”, productively used by Pomyalovsky. As a result of the research, it was found that the novelty of raznochintsy (non-noble intelligentsia) literature, traditionally considered from the point of view of contrasting the real school of raznochintsy writers and the so-called noble literature, is based, in a “technological” sense, on its basic achievements and universal principles of plot, as well as close typological approaches to creating the hero of the time.