Satire and the Sense of Reality in Gogol and Dostoevsky Anonymous 12th Grade

Following the resurgence of the Russian writer with Alexander Pushkin, a new generation of Russian authors emerged. Among the writers of the ‘Golden Age of Russian Literature’ are Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoyevsky who dominated the field. Unlike many other writers of the period, both predominantly disregarded the pastoral but rather chose for their ridiculous characters to inhabit the sordid streets of St Petersburg. Many of these polygeneric works can be categorised as satires. Caryl Emerson emphasises the consequence placed upon “laughter” which serves to divorce them from the line of ‘Pushkinian’ writers such as Tolstoy, Lermontov and Chekhov. This laughter, often at the expense of their downtrodden ‘heroes’, is a symptom of the satire imbued within even the most tragic narratives. Employed to label a heterogenous myriad of literature, satire, in its most fundamental form, is “the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticise people’s stupidity or vices”. Yet, the overwhelming consensus is that there are only two fundamental rudiments of satire: “one is wit or humour, the other is an object of attack”. For the purpose of this essay, this binary premise will be applied to identify instances of...