"A little villa, spick and span": out-of-town house as an ideal domestic in the literature about clerks and racks (Russian-English context)
We will look at the out-of-town house in the English “clerk literature” of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an ideal space, a place of solitude, a small analogue of the “earthly paradise”. Our task will be to identify the main typological features of this locus, analyze exactly how, and for what purpose, the authors appeal to them - and try to find out why such a house becomes an ideal refuge. Supporting our arguments, we will cite specific examples from the English “clerk literature” (W. Grossmith, J. Davidson, E. W. Radford), as well as from similar genres and movements (K. Grahame, E. M. Forster). As an additional task, we would like to analyze whether similar spaces are found in Russian literature of the aforementioned period (taking for comparison the Russian dacha at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries), can we speak of an absolute analogue, and if so, how these spaces are organized in two different literatures and at the expense of what elements there is a convergence. We will also support our thoughts with quotations from the key works of Russian literature of the turn of the century, devoted to the dacha topos.