Między grozą a przyjemnością. O wyrażaniu emocji w elegii rosyjskiej końca XVIII i początku XIX wieku

• Authors: Barbara Stawarz

Title variants

EN

Between terror and pleasure. On expressing emotions in Russian elegies at the turn of 18th and 19th c.

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The paper addresses the issue of expressing in the Russian language a wide range of deeply felt emotions and moods, which had at the time become a bone of contention, yet at the same time fusing together various dissident associations (e.g. Karamzinists, Shyshkovites and their followers) that operated in Russia at the turn of 18th and 19th century. The elegiac poets (inter alia A. Shirinsky-Shakhmatov, N. Gneditch, A. Benitsky, G. Kamenev, I. Dmitrev, M. Muraviov, A. Turgenev), whilst drawing extensively on both Western and domestic poetic paradigms strove to invent the means of expression well matched to giving vent to a scope of deep emotions like sorrow, anxiety and terror (i.e. archaists). This was achieved through introducing a poet’s alter ego into a desolate landscape of a graveyard, or crumbling ruins, so that it could experience in perfect solitude the sheer complexity of emotions evoked by a complete silence, only occasionally punctuated by sound. This was meant to stimulate one’s own imagination, to become, as it were, a breeding ground for a deep eschatological anxiety, whilst at the same time being evocative of pleasures associated with resurrecting one’s own, already non-existent image, through a heart-felt empathy (Karamzinists) with complex emotional landscaping of another human being as a brand new writing experience in the literature of the period.

Keywords

EN

elegy; terror; pleasure; Karamzinists; Shyshkovites

• Publisher: Committee on Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slavia Orientalis
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 63
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 19-40

Contributors

author

Barbara Stawarz

• Katedra Literatury Rosyjskiej Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego w Krakowie im. KEN, ul. Studencka 5, 30-084 Kraków, Poland