The place and role of the English text in the metatext of Vestnik Evropy in 1807-1811, the period of V.A. Zhukovsky's editorship (based on the prose)

The article analyzes the image of English culture and literature V.A. Zhukovsky created on the pages of Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe, Messenger of Europe) magazine in 1807-1811, when he was its editor and later co-editor (with M.T. Kachenovsky). It is known that the writer used this magazine to make a revolution in the Russian public consciousness and literature claiming a new artistic method - Romanticism. The research is based on the prose translations Zhukovsky made for Vestnik Evropy. Zhukovsky's (through him, the early 19th-century Russian literature) reception of English culture and literature objectified in literary texts is considered revealing one of its brightest demonstrations as a type of culture. Zhukovsky builds its unique image through the prism of his own philosophical and artistic aspirations and searches of the national literature and culture of the 1800s. The writer forms texts using the leading romantic concept of the person as a unique individuality, personality with unlimited spiritual potential. This idea is the basis for the analysis of translations from the works of Adam Smith, Mungo Park, J. Miller's letters to K.V. Bonstetten, etc.). Particular attention is given to the translations Zhukovsky made for the magazine in 1808-1809 from G.K. Lichtenberg's famous The World of Hogarth. Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings. These works, like the originals, are examples of the intermedial text - a translation of visual images and stories of the famous English artist of the 17th century, W. Hogarth, the creator of the routine, satirical genre in painting, into verbal fragments eventually compiled in a major work of the German educator, Lichtenberg. The translated descriptions of Hogarth's paintings depicting people "as they deserve it" constitute a living picture of manners in England as well as an encyclopedia of human characters in their universal and national identity. In addition, the English text of VestnikEvropy in its intermediate genres mentions English public figures of culture, politics, etc. Typically, these are symbolic names associated with a large number of ideas and concepts that allow expanding the boundaries of the foreign language text. The "literary" part of the English text of Vestnik Evropy in the given period is no less indicative for describing the formation of Zhukovsky as a Romanticist and Romanticism in Russia as a whole. These are Zhukovsky's translations from English literature (a story by M. Edgeworth) and from other European literary works somehow connected with England (novels and stories by A.M.E. Flahaut, S. Genlis, F.R. Chateaubriand and anonymous texts, including the French versions of O. Goldsmith's essay ''On the Distresses of the Poor, exemplified in the Life of a Private Sentinel'', or "The Retired Minister and a Beggar with a Wooden Leg" by Zhukovsky), an essay by Humphry Repton that Zhukovsky translated from its French version ( "The Adventures of a Shy Person (which he wrote himself)") Taken together, these translations characterize primarily the genre and style searches of Zhukovsky as a prose writer that are oriented at new romanticist aesthetics and poetics. It is concluded that the boundaries of the quite extensive English (namely prose) text created in Vestnik Evropy by the first Russian Romanticist are simultaneously strictly delineated and open. Due to this it contains a whole layer of English names, events and works of different cultural epochs. There are texts of different genres united by the common "dictionary" of ideas, concepts, motives. The English text of Vestnik Evropy reflecting the logic of Zhukovsky's formation, his interest in the history of England interacts with other national magazine texts (primarily German and French), which can certainly be the object of special study.

Keywords

Authors

References