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ECHOES OF DOSTOEVSKY AND BLOK IN NIKOLAI ERDMAN’S “THE SUICIDE” // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2011. Issue 7 (109). P. 19-26

Customarily one speaks of the influence that great Russian playwrights like Gogol, Sukhovo-Kobylin and Ostrovsky had on Nikolai Erdman. But it can be shown that Erdman also knew well the works of other classic writers, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Blok. This becomes clear when conducting even a simple analysis of Dostoevsky’s “The Devils,” Blok’s famous essays on revolution and Erdman’s “The Suicide.” Dostoevsky’s Kirillov and Erdman’s Podsekalnikov are both individuals that others seek to push into the act of committing suicide for the general good. By the same token, one can even find the germ of the basic plot complication in Erdman’s play in one of Blok’s essays. Any of Erdman’s characters who have a vested interest in Podsekalnikov’s death could easily have uttered this phrase from Blok: “How can I object to a person who has been driven to suicide by the demands of individualism, demonism, aesthetics or, finally, the most concrete, most banal need of despair and anguish?” The point, however, is not so much that we can find echoes reverberating among the works of Erdman, Dostoevsky and Blok, but rather that these echoes allow us to determine that Erdman’s task in writing “The Suicide” was far greater than just to write a satire. In “The Suicide” Erdman created his own artistic universe which embodies his own unique philosophical world view.

Keywords: N. Erdmann, F. Dostoevsky, A. Blok, roll call, interpretation, unique of the philosophical world view.