[The protagonist and the author in the Poetics of Romanticism: a study of Denis Davydov]

Abstract

The published text is a fragment of the 1st chapter of G. A. Gukovsky’s book «Pushkin and the Russian Romantics», first published by the Saratov University Press in 1946. The book was released by the author as the first part of “Essays on the History of Russian Realism”, a widely conceived study designed to outline the logic of the development of Russian (and, to a certain extent, New European) literature in the 19th and early 20th centuries. XX century, before Gorky’s «Klim Samgin». Gukovsky managed to prepare two more parts of this work, which were published posthumously: (1) “Pushkin and the Problems of Realistic Style” (1957) and (2) “Gogol’s Realism” (1959). An idea of the further direction of Gukovsky’s work is given by his voluminous 1947 article «On the Question of the Style of the Soviet Novel,» which he tried to publish in the New World in the second edition. The general theoretical framework, to which Gukovsky in 1942–1943 thought to devote a separate work, turned out to be largely outlined in the externally prepared (as part of the «planned» work as an employee of the Leningrad Branch of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences) and published only in 1966 in the book «The study of literary works in school» [Gukovsky, 1966]. The first chapter of Pushkin and the Russian Romantics is devoted primarily to the analysis of Romanticism as a style and construction of a romantic subject (in conjunction with the problem of the author’s figure) based on the material of V. A. Zhukovsky’s work, while our selected fragment, in addition to vividly highlighting the aforementioned issues, has a complete compositional character and allows us to see and evaluate the specific historical work of the researcher and the theoretical underpinning of the latter.
The text is printed based on the only lifetime publication: Gukovsky G. A. Essays on the history of Russian Realism. Part I: Pushkin and the Russian Romantics.  Saratov: Saratov State University named after N. G. Chernyshevsky, 1946. pp. 118–132. Text preparation, introductory note and notes — A. A. Tesli. The work was carried out within the framework of the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 22-18-00591 «Pragmasemantics as an interface and an operational system of semantic formation» at the I. Kant Baltic Federal University.