Comment les paysans russe lisaient leurs classiques : Le cas de Nicolas Gogol

What is the study of the reception of a great author by and within a social group? On the one hand, a discourse on the conditions of the reception, which may be described in terms of domination-submission, at least referring to what is perceived. On the other, a discourse on the specific stylistic features of certain textual structures and on the possible tactics of appropriation of those structures by the group. In studying the reception of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) by the peasant world, we draw from two types of sources: some re-elaborated versions of Gogol’s works made by popular authors for a peasant audience in the 1880s; the transcriptions of the verbal reactions of groups of peasants during the reading of Gogol’s texts, recorded by village schoolmasters in that period. In our research we try to shed light on the the pressures suffered by the peasants in taking possession of Gogol’s prose. At the same time, we highlight the resistance and the difference in meaning between what is proposed by Gogol’s text and what is made of it by the peasant reader. As a result, the image of Gogol’s work returned by peasants is not a simply mutilated, rounded down, inadequate image. It is a work in which the descriptions of nature, the metaphors and the similes tend to transform into a myriad of characters and micro-stories that intersect and intertwine in the plot designed by the author in a way that seems to educated observers apparently unexpected and incoherent.