Circulation of Capital as a Plot in the Fiction of "Natural School": Ideology, Narrative, Context

The period of the 1840s turned out to be especially productive in terms of the formation of narrative paradigms in literature, which occurred under the influence of of a large-scale ideological shifting due to socio-political and economic changes in Russian Empire. Particularly, a significant monetary reform of 1839-1843 became both a consequence and a symbol of the destabilization of monetary standards, of increasingly heated public debates regarding political-economic issues and rising sense of social uncertainty. This led to the development of extensive monetary and political-economic discourse in in journalism, academic researches and public policy of the 1840s. Literature became one more media discourse, in view of the modernization of literature social status at that time – literature is beginning to be perceived as a democratic space for discussing pressing social problems, and therefore its social functions are changing and developing. Chapter I of the thesis is devoted to the consideration of the political economic crisis in the field of literature and criticism of the 1840s, of its impact on aesthetic and artistic principles. In this regard the works of the member-writers of the first utopian socialists’‎ circles (particularly, Petrashevsky Circle), as well as the phenomenon of these organizations themselves, is of interest. The discourse, in turn, fueled the ‘economic’ imagination of the writers and proved productive as narrative paradigms – in terms of the formation of new narrative forms. In accordance with this, several texts (written in the tradition of the “natural school”) are analyzed in the thesis from the point of view of the monetary issue influence on them - “Mr. Prokharchin” (Gospodin Prokharchin) by Fyodor Dostoevsky (chapter II), “Mr. Svetelkin” (Gospodin Svetyolkin) and the unfinished novel “Money” (Den’gi) by Mikhail Dostoevsky (chapter III), as well as two stories by Yakov Butkov - “One Hundred Rubles” (Sto Rubley) and “A Good Place” (Horoshee mesto), which are included in Butkov’s collection of short stories and novels “Petersburg Peaks” (Peterburgskie Vershiny) (chapter IV). An analysis of the texts, the structure of which, we suggest, was influenced by monetary issues, allows to investigate the specifics of the interaction between literature and political-economy thought. This interaction affected the ideological and symbolic levels in the texts, together with the functioning of language in them, narrative and formal features.