G. N. Potanin’s novel “The Old Gets Older, the Young Grows Up” and 19th-century Russian narrative prose about peasants

<jats:p>The article is devoted to the analysis of the novel “The Old Gets Older, the Young Grows Up” by the now almost forgotten writer Gavriil N. Potanin, “a man of the sixties” (1860s Russian intelligentsia). The purpose of the study is to contextualize G. Potanin’s little-known novel within the Russian historical and literary landscape of the second half of the 19th century, specifically among works of Russian narrative prose about peasants. The scientific originality of the research lies in determining the way of representing the peasant world in the novel “The Old Gets Older, the Young Grows Up” and in establishing specific connections between the novel’s fictional reality and events in the author’s life, as reflected in Potanin’s unpublished ego-literary texts – his personal diary and autobiography. The results obtained allow us to conclude that “The Old Gets Older, the Young Grows Up”, on the one hand, combines motifs and themes already present in the Russian tradition of depicting peasants, themes, and perspectives (interest in ethnography, criticism of urban civilization, certain images). On the other hand, a not entirely typical love story and the fact that Potanin writes a coming-of-age novel in which the main character is a serf allow us to speak of the uniqueness of the novel “The Old Gets Older, the Young Grows Up” for Russian literature.</jats:p>