The mystery of (non)Russian names in the novel “Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes” by William Gerhardie

Abstract

The paper examines the system of characters in William Gerhardie’s novel “Futility” (1922) in the imagological perspective. The aim of the study is to determine the features of depiction of the Russian world in Gerhardie’s novel in its interaction with the world of European culture in the aspect of personality and interpersonal relationships. The scientific originality of the paper is due to both the insufficient degree of research of the major material (W. Gerhardie’s works in general and his novel “Futility” in particular) and the scholars’ focus on the problem of interaction of cultural identities in the field of a character’s personality, as well as relations between the characters. The following results were obtained in the course of the research: a) it was proved that the main characters of Gerhardie’s novel possess inner features attributed by the author both to European (German, British) world and to Russian culture; b) it was concluded that the problem of national and cultural identity forms the foundation of relationships between the characters; c) it was discovered that behavior patterns and internal reactions of the characters have a common semantic core correlated in the novel with the Russian world – more precisely, with the Russian intellectual society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: that is, submission to fate, the state of expectation, deep alienation from others; d) it was argued that the image of the Russian world created by Gerhardie in his novel is essentially based on the biographical context and works by A. P. Chekhov.