"THE FAKE DOCTOR" IN THE 19TH CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE

The article provides a historical and literary commentary to Yu. K. Olesha's speech at the Second All-Union Conference of the Authors' Societies in Leningrad in January 1932. It reconstructs the context of the images of "quackery" and "surgery" he used to describe the autonomous nature of the creative process. The ideas of the speech seem to be related to the new phase of the conflict between the "fellow writers" (poputchiki) and RAPP in the late 1931 - early 1932.The article deals with the doctor characters whose prototypes have nothing to do with medicine. As a rule, in the works of art, such "doctors" never actually doctor, but reason, doing it, by the most part, from the standpoint of materialism. Thus, it is not a "fake" doctor, but rather a "conditional" one. Sometimes a writer makes his character a "doctor" in order to distract the reader from the actual prototype. This is the case with Turgenev's Bazarov who had N. A. Dobroliubov for his principal prototype. The article also discusses in detail the type of the "fake", or rather "conditional" doctor, using Doctor Voznesensky from Chekov's novel The Shooting Party (1885) as the example.