The Poetics of the Carnation: The Word and the Image in Russian Poetry From Trediakovsky to Brodsky (In the Context of European Tradition). Part One

The research outlines the use of the word gvozdika (Eng. ‘carnation’, a species of Dianthus) in Russian poetry. The author takes the European tradition as a framework to describe and analyse diverse representations of the carnation in Russian, mainly poetic, texts of the 18th through 20th centuries, tracing the development and expansion of “carnation-driven” contexts and associations. Part One opens with a retrospective insight into the history of the carnation in European culture, debunking several popular misconceptions, related to the flower’s history and name, which had been uncritically repeated over many decades. The ubiquity of wild carnations has contributed to the belief that, like the rose and the lily, the carnation has a two-thousand-year cultural history. Thus, it might be assumed that the carnation’s beauty and spicy aroma should have set it apart from other flowers, so that it might gradually acquire various symbolic meanings. Indeed, researchers and writers have often noted the ancient symbolism of the carnation. Moreover, both popular and academic writings place the carnation in the limited and well-defined set of plants cultivated in Antiquity. The research into the historical significance of the carnation shows that its oft-postulated antiquity is nothing but wishful thinking: the cultural history of the carnation as well as its symbolic meanings cannot be traced back as a single process from Antiquity to the Present. Until the 14th century, the carnation was referred to by many different names; its literary and symbolic genealogy can only be traced back to the 15 th or 16th century, i.e. when it was introduced into horticulture and when stable designations for it appeared in the new European languages. Our analysis draws on comparative material from Spanish, Italian, French, German, and English poetry (poems by Luis de Gongora y Argote, Francisco de Quevedo, Joachim du Bellay, Remy Belleau, Pierre de Ronsard, and others) and employs numerous multilingual sources to shed light on the history of the carnation in European languages and literatures. In addition, we briefly trace the horticultural history of the carnation in Russia. The garden carnation, or the clove pink, has been known in Russia at least since the 17th century. It was among the plants bought in Holland by the Flower Office of Peter the Great. In the 18th century, the carnation was already widespread in Russian gardens: numerous detailed articles about the carnation, its varieties and cultivations are found in botanical directories and various indexes of the late 18th century. The Alphabetical Catalogue of Plants <...> in Moscow in the Garden of the Active State Councillor Prokofy Demidov, published in 1786, lists 52 varieties of the carnation. Yet, however popular the carnation was in everyday life, it rarely appeared in Russian literature of the 17th and 18th centuries.

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