ON THE ISSUE OF THE ARTISTIC PECULIARITY OF ‘THE COMELY COOK’ BY M.D. CHULKOV ON THE BACKGROUND OF THE EUROPEAN NOVELISTIC TRADITION OF THE XVIII CENTURY
This article has made an attempt to reveal the artistic peculiarity of ‘The Comely Cook, or the Adventures of a Depraved Woman’ by M.D. Chulkov on the background of the European novelistic tradition. While creating his work, M.D. Chulkov based it on the European novelistic tradition of the XVIII century; however, he created a novel structurally different from western specimens of the genre. The motive of the European prose character’s moral evolution, his moral uprise, a moral metamorphosis as the main narrative line of a moral-descriptive novel of the XVIII century proved alien to M.D. Chulkov’s mental settings. Generalizing scientific observations in the sphere of the European novel’s history, the author formulated the peculiarities typical of the novelistic form that had established by the XVIII century. At the same time, there was an obvious indication that the work by M.D. Chulkov was not compliant with that form. ‘The Comely Cook’by M.D. Chulkov was opposed to the moral settings of his European predecessors in the novelistic genre. It got disclosed in the ‘Preannouncement’ that was expressly burlesque and critical towards the European texts. The main precepts of ‘The Comely Cook’ by M.D. Chulkov were not about description of the heroine’s moral metamorphosis, but about disclosure of a new aspect of reality that had not been available in the Russian literature before. The work proposed an unconventional assessment of ‘The Comely Cook’ by M.D. Chulkov as the first Russian novel that deliberately approached the description of a marginal world and a marginal character.