I would like to write something like Ossian...": on G.R. Derzhavin's Russo-Varangian poetry in the 1810s

At the turn of the 19th century Gavrila Derzhavin followed the Ossianic movement that was very popular in Europe. Based on the Old Irish poetic traditions, Ossianism was a literary trend pertaining to the Irish warrior and bard - Ossian whose poems were written in the high-sounding and inflated language. Derzhavin's poems written at that time were glorifying the Russian Army and the Russian Arms. Derzhavin's manner to write poems in Ossian's style was influenced by A.S. Shishkov as well as his own active participation in the literary circle The Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word. In his Russo-Varangian Poetry of 1810-1813 Derzhavin widely used literary folk tales and popular narrative songs. However, he changed the folk oral narratives according to his literary taste and wrote new texts using folk plots in the original literary shapes. For example, his musical romance "Goddess Phrygia's Dwelling" (1812) employs the image of a Scandinavian poet and warrior led by Bragi, the Scandinavian God of Poetry, who helps the warrior overcome various obstacles, such as dense forests, bogs and castles guarded by dragons, military camps of pagans and the like in order to get to Valhalla, a hall where, according to the Scandinavian mythology, the souls of those who have died in combat feast with Odin for eternity. The reader comes across the dim and dark mood characteristic to both the Scandinavian sagas, Dante's Inferno and Resurrection showing the hero's way to the Truth poetically realized by the author. A Russian ballad "Zlogor, Volkhv of Novgorod", unlike the texts written after the Scandinavian sagas, is based on one of the Russian Novgorod original plots. The action in the Novgorod legend takes place in Zvanka, Gavriil Derzhavin's estate. As a result, the poetic text combines two realities as well as the real with the fictious. The author, disguised as a Norwegian scald, belongs to two absolutely different space-time continua and can affirm the possibility of both to exist as a part of a real world due to the chosen genre patterns. Another author's mask is seen in Derzhavin's poem "The Tzar-Girl" (1812) that contaminates the Russian traditional bylyna and fairy-tales repertoires. In this poem the reader comes across practical jokes, mystifications and changing clothes, rather than the dark Ossi-anic colouring. The author wears the mask of a famous Russian legendary folk story-teller Boyan. This approach lets the author tell jokes and mock at the hierarchy of social and religious values fixed in various traditional literary works and their canons of the time. Thus in his Russo-Varangian poetry of the 1810s Derzhavin aspires to synthesize the high literary style with the Northern traditional folk cultures expressed by a folk-tale narrator - a bard.

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