Gogol’ pre-classico : Due casi di ricezione

In this article, we analyse the impact Gogol’s work had in two different social groups and at different historical stages before it became a classic. At first, we will look at the success of Gogol’s work in the court of Nicholas I in the mid-1830s, before contemporary critics made him a ‘classic.’ Then we will look at his fortune in the peasant world at the end of the 19th century, when Gogol was still unknown to most of the popular readers and his works circulated mostly anonymously. The idea I would like to bring out from these cases is that the concept of the classic, before the creation of a national school system, has a different development and temporality depending on the social groups in which an author circulates. Furthermore, a text by a noncanonised author stimulates in readers a quite different aesthetic and ideological response to that elicited once it has become a classic, highlighting different stylistic and conceptual aspects of the work itself.