Abstract:

Usadba (усадьба) which is defined as a detached residential area in Russian architecture, is considered a cultural phenomenon as a way of life beyond housing. The park, garden, church, cistern etc. structures which shape and reflect the views of the nobility about the ideal private life, are a representation of daily life and spiritual values surrounded by cultural elements. The usadba life, which existed from the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, is considered as an important research area not only for Russian culture and Russian history, but also for Russian literature with its noble home myth reflecting the lives of its inhabitants. In this context, cultural history and literature-oriented scientific studies carried out at the end of the 1990s accept the usadba life as a research subject under the roof of the usadba text (усадебный текст). The usadba text, which is methodically positioned at the intersection of literary and cultural history, is shaped on the basis of the cultural and local text concept of Vladimir Toporov and Yury Lotman. The usadba life is accepted as an important part of the cultural sphere describing Russia. It gains depth with the classification of the usadba text put forward by the researcher Vasily Shchukin and the monographs of literary scholars such as Elena Dmitriyeva, Olga Kuptsova, and Tatyana Japlova who evaluate usadba as a topos at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. In this study, the evolution process of usadba life in Russian literature, which has gone through different turns due to cultural, historical, and social developments, is handled with an interdisciplinary method in the case of Anton Chekhov's The House with the Mezzanine (Дом с мезонином).

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