From Carnival Transduction to Ontological Catastrophe: Early Gogol Between Simondon and Lotman

The article examines how Gogol's early Ukrainian tales model the transition from the productive resolution of pre-individual tensions to their irreversible failure. The coupling of Simondon's procedural ontology and Lotman's semiotics of boundaries allows for the introduction of concepts such as carnival transduction, ontological catastrophe, and negative explosion in the analysis of "The Sorochyntsi Fair," "The Night Before Christmas," "Viy," and "The Terrible Revenge." In some texts, festive time and ritual disguise still transform the boundary between the familiar and the foreign into a zone of playful translation, where laughter dispels horror. In others, conversely, the absence of carnival sanction results in the destruction of the very capacity for recoding: Viy's gaze, the frozen monsters in the church windows, and the endless battle of the dead in the Carpathians fix a pure negative explosion that does not produce new meaning. The research strategy relies on three methods: a conceptual synthesis of Simondon's ontology and Lotman's semiotics, an operational analysis of scenes where an object functions as an onto-semiotic operator (the red shirt, the boots, Viy's gaze), and the typologization of failure scenarios in individuation (narrative deception, topological collapse, ontological catastrophe). Instead of harmonious synthesis, we confront transduction and boundaries, revealing the operational logic that anticipates the crises of the Petersburg cycle. The method does not illustrate theories but extracts mechanisms from the text that describe how tension is resolved in laughter or freezes in emptiness. The analysis highlights the internal evolution of early Gogol: from the carnival harmony of "The Night Before Christmas" and "The May Night" through the narrative deception of "The Lost Letter" and the topological collapse of "The Enchanted Place" to the ontological catastrophe of "The Terrible Revenge." This evolution is not reduced to a chronological transition but describes different modes of relation to the pre-individual remainder. Laughter, which in the early tales still alleviated tension and opened the way to renewal, gradually loses its liberating power, transforming into a symptom of irreconcilable disparateness. Horror, on the other hand, ceases to be an event and becomes a familiar background against which any sign risks becoming detached from its referent. The article proposes a typology of these modes, allowing for a new reading of the early tales not as folklore stylization but as a laboratory of individuation crisis, preparing the cold absurdity of Petersburg texts.