Russkij roman XIX veka : ispytanije provinciej

By the middle of 19 century the Russian novel undergoes a considerable evolution in its attitude to the provinces. If the test of a province in the novels of Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov was as a distinctive mark of a moral's potential test, and the provincial consciousness (often identical with the consciousness of the common people) was declared as a bearer of a national character‟s secrecy, then in the followed literary tradition we could see the transformation of the conception of the essence of provincialism. In the novels of Turgenev, Goncharov and Tolstoy the relocation of the character to the province brings him to his natural existence and his way back to himself passed through understanding the secrecy of the common people's life.This phenomenological structure of the novel is very typically a different dimension of time and space. It‟s not as in the capital. In the structure of the narration we could see the dichotomised system of characters, out of order from the real life characters. The other tendency in the picture of the provinces characterizes the novels of Shchedrin, Leskov and late Dostoevsky's, who had associated the province not with some positive beginning of Russian life but with the mirror which reflected and even more – enlarged the "screwed up face" of Russian reality. The Provincial is becoming a model of life which tests the characters. The space of the character‟sconsciousness weighted with a space of cultural and moral values of an appointed epoch, accepted or rejected them.