Nikolay Gogol’s Viy Translated into the Language of Popular Culture of the Late 19th – Early 20th Centuries

The paper deals with the lubok adaptation of Nikolay Gogol’s story Viy, The Terrible Beauty, or Three Nights at the Coffin (1883), as well as several dramatic adaptations of this story from the late 19th – early 20th centuries (by Mark Kropivnitsky, 1896; Nikolay Dingelstedt, 1897; Elizaveta Shabelskaya, 1898; Konstantin Maslennikov, 1901; Fedor Zadubrovsky (Prusakov) and Maria Kretova, 1904). These works of mass culture have hitherto been understudied in comparison with the numerous literary works that contain allusions, stylizations, or pastiches of Gogol’s works. The lubok and dramatic adaptations have common features, which are the additional love affair and the poetics of a happy ending, and the technique of a “cocktail of motifs” (combinations of motifs from other Gogol’s works). At the same time, they knowingly use folklore styles, motifs, and linguistic formulas. Vilmos Voigt called this mechanism of modern mass culture “folklorisation.” The paper examines these works in the context of the ideas of Yury Lotman, Roland Barthes, Sergey Zenkin, John G. Cawelti, and the theory and practice of reverse translation, offered by Alexander V. Mikhailov.