Title of the article:

TOWARDS THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN POETICAL NARRATION: PROSAIC AUTOCOMMENTARY IN THE POEMS “THE SPECULATIONS OF THE SOUL” BY P. BUSLAEV AND “THE JOYOUS SCIENCE” BY M. AMELIN

Author(s):

Veronika B. Zuseva-Özkan

Information about the author/authors

Veronika B. Zuseva-Özkan — DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, Department of Modern European and American Literatures, А. М. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; Chief Research Fellow with the Center of Scientific Projects of the Office for Scientific Work, The Russian State University for the Humanities, Miusskaya Square, 6, 125047 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9537-108X
E-mail: v.zuseva.ozkan@gmail.com

Section

Philological sciences

Year

2022

Volume

Vol. 65

Pages

pp. 192–207

Received

October 28, 2020

Approved after reviewing

December 12, 2020

Date of publication

September 28, 2022

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37816/2073-9567-2022-65-192-207

Index UDK

821.161.1.0

Index BBK

83.3(2Рос=Рус)

Acknowledgements

The research was carried out with support of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 20-18-00417).

Abstract

The paper aims to compare the long poems by Petr Buslaev (“The Speculations of the Soul”, 1734) and Maksim Amelin (“The Joyous Science”, 1999). The author proves the genetic relatedness between two poems and specifically focuses on the phenomenon of the prosaic stanza-by-stanza auto-commentary on the margins of the poetical text, which is extremely rare and unequivocally reveals the association between Amelin’s and Buslaev’s works. The author also dwells on the narrative subject (i. e. the subject of speech and consciousness) — both in the main poetical text and the prosaic auto-commentary of the poems — revealing the similarities and differences between the two literary works belonging to different epochs of poetics: traditionalist (or eidetic) and the non-classical phase of the poetics of the artistic modality. The analysis moves on with less detail onto all structural levels of both poems; the author establishes that Amelin, on the one hand, reproduces poetical principles of the 18th century in general and those of the poetical narration of the period in particular, and, on the other hand, he transforms them in accordance with the spirit of new poetics. While borrowing the most prominent feature of the late-Baroque poem by Buslaev — the auto-commentary on the margins of the poetical text, Amelin copies its outer appearance at the same time reorienting it and turning the device of the “learned poetry” that seek to explain to the reader all the obscure elements of the text and propose the only right interpretation of the poetical text into the literary game creating the meaningful clash of styles, epochs, and worldviews.

Keywords

Petr Buslaev, Maksim Amelin, long (narrative) poem, historical narratology, prosaic auto-commentary, poetical narration, Baroque and Neo-Baroque.

References

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