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Problems of Form and Literary Influence in the Poetry of Karamzin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anthony Cross
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Extract

Although his poetry enjoyed considerable contemporary popularity, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin belonged to the generation of poets characterized by Ivan Rozanov as “interesting precisely for its attempts and strivings: we find almost no attainments here.” Despite the curious fact that Karamzin's verse has been reprinted in the present century more frequently than his prose, its interest for the modern reader is of an essentially historical nature. Professor Iurii M. Lotman, editor of the recent authoritative and complete collection of Karamzin's poetry, has stressed in his excellent introduction that “it is impossible to understand Karamzin the prose writer and ignore Karamzin the poet,” but his ultimate conclusion that “his poetic gift, perhaps, manifested itself with even greater force in his prose” reestablishes the primacy of the prose. Karamzin in his poetry was a stikhotvorets rather than a poet—a conscious craftsman who introduced new themes, brought a fresh approach to traditional subjects and genres, and experimented with language, form, and meter.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 39 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1968

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References

1 Rozanov, Russkaia lirika, I : Ot poezii bezlichnoi h ispovedi serdtsa (Moscow, 1914), 83.

2 In N. M. Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1966), p. 26. Subsequent references in the text of this article to specific poems by Karamzin are from this edition : PSS, followed by the page number.

3 Ibid., p. 51.

4 Ibid., p. 27.

5 N. I. Vtorov, “Gavrila Petrovich Kamenev,” Vchera i segodnia (St. Petersburg), No. 1, 1845, p. 50.

6 I. I. Dmitriev, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 1895), I, 302.

7 A. N. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Moscow and Leningrad, 1961), p- 125.

8 Ibid.

9 Semennikov, Radishchev : Ocherki i issledovaniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1923), pp. 451-52.

10 Pis'ma N. M. Karamzina k I. I. Dmitrievu, ed. la. Grot and P. Pekarskii (St. Petersburg, 1866), p. 10.

11 Ibid., p.13.

12 Moskovskii zhurnal, II (May 1791), 115.

13 Ibid., I (Feb.), 146; III (Aug.), 123; IV (Oct.), 11.

14 Vostokov, , Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow, 1935), pp. 130, 152.Google Scholar

15 Burgi, , A History of the Russian Hexameter (Hamden, Conn., 1954), p. 74.Google Scholar

16 Matthisson, , Gedichte (Zurich, 1821), p. 72.Google Scholar

17 Atkins, H. G., A History of German Versification (London, 1923), pp. 249–50.Google Scholar

18 This total includes the six poems in the Dubia section but excludes the verses in Karamzin's translation from Weisse, Arkadskii pamiatnik (1789) (PSS, pp. 317-56), as well as the translations in the Letters of a Russian Traveler (PSS, pp. 84-99).

19 The meter of this poem is generally termed a four-foot trochaic line with a dactylic clausula (see A. Astakhova, “Iz istorii i ritmiki khoreia,” Poetika, I [Leningrad, 1926], 60), although it has been called an epic trochaic tetrameter because of the occasional stress on the final syllable (see C. L. Drage, “Trochaic Metres in Early Russian Syllabo-Tonic Poetry,” Slavonic and East European Review, XXXVIII [June i960], 373). 20This is discounting the particular case of Karamzin's translation in unrhymed verse of Haydn's oratorio Die Schopfung, published in 1801 (PSS, pp. 270-73).

21 Pogodin, M. N., Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, po ego sochineniiam, pis'mam i otzyvam sovremennikov (Moscow, 1866), I, 246.Google Scholar

22 Radishchev, p. 125.

23 Moskovskii zhurnal, VI (April 1792), 78.

24 Egunov, A. N., Gomer v russkikh percvodakh XVIH-XIX vekov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964), pp. 121–24.Google Scholar

25 Before 1794 there are single examples of three-, six-, seven-, eight-, and ten-line stanzas and two instances of a five-line stanza.

26 I t is interesting, however, that when Karamzin followed his prose translation of the Seasons by a metrical version of the inset story “Lavinia” in 1789, he chose unrhymed alexandrines rather than blank verse. Indeed, despite his admiration for Thomson, Milton, Pope, and Klopstock, he never once used blank verse, preferring to write unrhymed verse in combination with other meters.

27 Perepiska Karamzina s Lafaterom (St. Petersburg, 1893), p. 6.

28 Karamzin, N. M., Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964), II, 80.Google Scholar

29 Rozanov, M. N., Poet perioda “burnykh stremlenii” Iakob Lents, ego zhizn’ i proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1901), pp. 488–89.Google Scholar

30 Izbrannye sochineniia, I, 174.

31 Ibid., p. 110.

32 The marginal notes which Petr A. Viazemskii made on the 1848 edition of Karamzin's verse reveal how impressed he was by the novelty in Russian verse of almost all Karamzin's poems in the Moskovskii zhurnal. See P. Sheremetev, Karamzin v Ostafeve, 1811-1911 (Moscow, 1911), pp. 91-97.

33 Chechulin, O stikhotvoreniiakh Karamzina (Petrograd, 1917), p. 11.

34 Alekseev, M. P., “K literaturnoi istorii odnogo iz romansov v ‘Don-Kikhote, ’ Seruantes : Stat'i i materialy (Leningrad, 1948), p. 117.Google Scholar

35 Pointed out by A. la. Kucherov in his introduction to Karamzin, N. and Dmitriev, I., Izbrannye stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1953), p. 468.Google Scholar

36 F. W., Neumann, “Karamzins Verhaltnis zu Schiller,” Zeitschrift fur slavische Philologie, IX (1932), 366–67.Google Scholar

37 The origin of this poem and its relevance in its adapted form to Karamzin's attitude towards the Moscow Freemasons and their philosophic and social ideas is convincingly demonstrated by V. V. Vinogradov in his Problema avtorstva i teoriia stilei (Moscow, 1961), pp. 324-38.

38 Karamzin met Matthisson in Lyons in March 1790; he wrote down—but never published— his version of Matthisson's poem in a letter to Dmitriev on November 18, 1791, suggesting that that was how they used to sing it in St. Petersburg, referring here in all probability to the period following his return from abroad in July 1790.

39 Izbrannye sochineniia, I, 346.

40 Pointed out by Lotman, in PSS, p. 394.

41 Izbrannye sochineniia, I, 292.

42 In a footnote to his “Triolet Alete” (1795) Karamzin explained the technique of this “versifying game” (PSS, p. 180).

43 Beginning with the second edition of Mot bezdelki (Part 2, 1797). It is interesting that Karamzin supplied this edition with a French epigraph from B. J. Saurin : “J'aime encore les vers, je le dis, et sans honte.“