Authors’ names:
Svetlana B. Koroleva – Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Abstract:
The article examines the development of English Pushkin studies in the period between the 1910s and the 1940s, with an emphasis on the general line of understanding Pushkin’s “Poltava” in connection with the use of the technique of comparing the poet with Peter the Great. It is argued that this issue has not received proper coverage by scholars. Interim conclusions are offered in this respect. It is proved that, in English literary criticism, Pushkin studies formed an established canon by the 1950s through the books by M. Baring, D. Mirsky, and Y. Lavrin about Pushkin and Russian literature. It is argued that Baring’s concept of Pushkin’s personality and creative development influenced both the books by Lavrin and (partly) Mirsky, as well as English Pushkin studies in general. The hallmarks of the English canon of Pushkin studies lie within the cultural paradigm of philological research combined with an ‘ethnophilosophical’ approach to the study of national literature; attention to the poet’s biography and to the general features of the artistic form and content of the poet’s works are also significant for English Pushkin studies of this period. The author demonstrates that the canon of English Pushkin studies was significantly influenced in this initial period by works of Dostoevsky and Merezhkovsky about Pushkin. Imagological mechanisms of assimilation and simplification served as mediators of this impact: through their prism, Pushkin’s works were inscribed into such conceptual categories as “European,” “English,” “universal,” “brilliant,” and “humane,” which are close to the English reader. It is argued that the general concept of “Russian,” based on Pushkin’s “Poltava” and the comparison between Pushkin and Peter the Great, appeared to simultaneously absorb and appropriate the “European” and to enter into the “European,” expanding it from the inside.
It is argued that John Bayley’s monograph “Pushkin. Comparative Commentary” (1971) opens a new page in the history of English Pushkin studies. Moving away from the cultural method and the ‘ethnophilosophical’ approach to literature and excluding imagological mechanisms from literary research, this book offers new guidelines: a comparative historical paradigm combined with a method of close reading, and attention to Soviet Pushkin studies.
| Section | ARTISTIC TEXT AT THE INTERSECTION OF CULTURES |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/ lunn2024-66-2-148-161 |
| Downloads | 206 |
| Key words | English Pushkin studies; poem by A.S. Pushkin “Poltava”; research paradigm; imagological mechanisms; Maurice Baring; Yanko Lavrin; Dmitry Mirsky |