The Peaceful Scenes of Military Life: The First Cycle of Stories by Nikolai Naumov
This article examines the cycle The Peaceful Scenes of Military Life and its place in Nikolai Naumov's literary work, which was continually combined with his civil service. The author of the article analyzes the mechanisms linking the stories of this cycle and helping Naumov to create the multi-faceted image of a Siberian soldier and Siberia as a specific locus. He also investigates the genre, ideological and aesthetic features of Naumov's literary work that are forming in this cycle under the influence of ideas of St. Petersburg Siberian circle. The analysis showed that, in this cycle, Naumov created a bright type of a Siberian, or rather some of its variants: carriers of national consciousness, traditions, universal values, according to Naumov preserved in their purest form in Siberia, and people with an emerging new type of consciousness, focused on individualism. In addition, the heroes of the cycle can be divided into two groups according to their social status, origin, worldview and belonging to the Siberian region: (1) Siberian soldiers who came the army from the peasant and philistine environment and (2) their commanders belonging to the nobility who came to Siberia from central Russia on duty. Naumov emphasizes the striking contrast between them, which shapes as hidden hostility and conflict. The narrator's (and author's) sympathy (but not idealization) is invariably addressed to Siberian soldiers. The other significant points of the poetics of cycliza-tion in The Peaceful Scenes of Military Life are the macro-plot, the common range of topics and problems, which allow Naumov to escape from the documentary narrative (this is how the theme of the Siberian peasantry was mainly interpreted by both metropolitan and Siberian writers) towards the artistic narration uniting the specific and the universal, the momentary and the eternal, circumstances and personal morality and psychology into a deep image of the world. Such a peculiar artistic embodiment of one of the most acute topics of Russian public life in the second half of the 19th century-the themes of Siberia and Siberian-organically fits into the general channel of the evolution of Russian literature of the period, testifying to the powerful socio-historical and cultural potential of this topic, whose development in the indicated way gives start to Naumov's service to Siberia.