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N. I. Gnedich’s Lyrical Universe in the Assessments of Yu. N. Tynyanov, V. F. Khodasevich, and V. V. Veresaev

https://doi.org/10.18384/2949-5008-2026-3-113-123

Abstract

Aim. To identify the main strategies for analysing Gnedich’s poetry in the literary research of the 1930s. 

Methodology. Yu. N. Tynyanov’s “Pushkin and His Contemporaries” (1929), V. F. Khodasevich’s “Pushkin and the Poets of His Time” (1933), and V. V. Veresaev “Pushkin’s Contemporaries” (1937) were used as a material for the research. By systematising judgments about Gnedich’s literary talent, the emotional sound of his poetic words, and his role in updating the poetic language, the understanding of the poet’s worldview is clarified. The methodology of the work is associated with the use of historical, functional, biographical, aesthetic methods and approaches that identify three main areas which formed the basis for combining the assessments and judgments of critics and literary critics into groups. 

Results. The article concretises the importance of Gnedich’s artistic system in the historical and literary process of the first third of the 19th century. The strategies for evaluating Gnedich’s artistic system in the works of Tynyanov, Khodasevich, and Veresaev are analysed and systematized. It is established that in the literary thought of the 1930s there were three main vectors for evaluating Gnedich’s artistic system that are determining the poet’s place in the development of the aesthetics of Romanticism, the question of his belonging to the elegiac school, and identifying the poet’s role in the formation of literary language. Tynyanov examines Gnedich’s influence on Pushkin, emphasising the poet’s borderline between archaists and innovators. Veresaev, although he notes the peculiarities of Gnedich’s artistic perception of the world, does not reveal the ontological meaning of his poetic images, while raising the question of choosing an authoritative source to evaluate Gnedich’s literary position. Khodasevich turns out to be the closest to recreating the romantic type of thinking of the poet, whose methodological messages are consonant with the value approach in literary criticism. It is proved that the study of the Gnedich worldview was not systematic.

Research implications. The theoretical significance of the study consists in the fact that the innovation of Gnedich’s poetic system in relation to previous classical poetry was identified, and it is also determined by the lack of research bringing together observations of Gnedich’s poetry scattered in various literary, critical, and literary works.

About the Author

K. A. Potashova
Federal State University of Education
Russian Federation

Ksenia A. Potashova - Dr. Sci. (Philology), Assoc. Prof., Assoc. Prof., Department of Russian and Foreign Literature

Moscow



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