The national, the imperial, the colonial as a factor of private life: V.A. Zhukovsky's epistle «To Voeikov»

In the hierarchy of the classical genres of the 18th - first third of the 19th centuries, the leading position belongs to the national verse epic that never gave Russian literature any recognised samples. The reason to it was the ideology of personalism assimilated by the Russian culture of the Modern Times in the process of its Europeanisation. It contradicted the traditionally despotic character of Russian statehood. The interiorisation of geopolitics and its transformation into a factor of the personal life of a private person is emblematically represented in the epistle "To Voeikov" (1814) by V.A. Zhukovsky, a consistent statist in the ideological position, yet one of the most self-conscious lyricists of Russian literature. In a sense, the epistle displaced the idea of the poem "Vladimir", which was thought to be a model of the national epic. At all the levels of poetics, the lyrical and epic elements of the epistle are in constant interaction. Its compositional core is the structure of a lyrical subject, uniting a private person, a citizen of his country and a poet. First of all, the atypical plot attracts attention: it is an appeal to the semi-legendary, semi-historical personality of Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Many associative parallels connected him with all the key epochs of the formation of the Russian mentality and Russian statehood. Parts of the plot were significant "laboratory" auto-reminiscences from "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" (Yaroslavna's Lament) Zhukovsky soon translated and from the ballad "Vadim". The modern battle epic is also reflected in Zhukovsky's epistle, but not in an objectively narrative, but in an intimate lyric manner: the motifs of memories of the war of 1812 are introduced into the epistle through the biography of the addressee. Voeikov's postwar journey in the interpretation of Zhukovsky creates a powerful associative field of potential reflection on the historical shaping of state borders and on the formation of the territory of Russia, contemporary with the two poets, in the course of its national liberation wars (from Batu to Napoleon) and conquering campaigns (from the epoch of Ivan the Terrible to the Treaty of Gulistan that ended the Russo-Persian war of 1803-1813.

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