Dictionary of Ancient and New Poetry by Nikolai Fedorovich Ostolopov as a stage in the formation of the rhetorical tradition in Russia

The article contains an interpretation of the rhetorical section of the Dictionary of Ancient and New Poetry created by Nikolai Fedorovich Ostolopov. Ostolopov worked on the dictionary - an assignment from the St. Petersburg Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences and the Arts - from 1806 to 1821. The three volumes of the dictionary include more than one and a half thousand pages with interpretations of 424 terms. Among the main sources of the dictionary are the Encyclopedia of Diderot, d’Alembert and other French thinkers. The text of the dictionary contains many references to the opinions of well-known Western European theorists of art and literature - Boileau, Marmontel, Butterweck, Enneken, Eschenburg, Lessing, Meissner, and others. Poetic samples in the dictionary are represented by Greek and Roman mythology, the Psalter, the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, ancient authors, new European writers, poetic works of Russian poets of the 18th - early 19th centuries. The examples given in the vocables are sometimes several pages long, if it is dictated by the purpose of illustrating the thematic and stylistic features of the genre. Terms from the field of eloquence demonstrate Ostolopov’s orientation to Lomonosov’s rhetorical theory - his Brief Guide to Eloquence (1747). However, Ostolopov creatively revises the achievements of his predecessors and offers his own typology of tropes and figures of speech. When classifying rhetorical devices, Ostolopov was guided by the already quite rich rhetorical tradition, choosing, probably, the most authoritative classification of Lomonosov as the main one. However, at the same time, Ostolopov introduced some changes to the supporting typology: there are noticeably more “word figures” than in Lomonosov and fewer “sentence figures”. In Ostolopov’s “trope and figure” section we find, for example, allegory, antithesis, irony, while allegory and irony are in Lomonosov’s “sentence tropes”, and antithesis is not in the classification. Hyperbole is a “figure of sayings and sentences” according to Ostolopov and a “sentence trope” according to Lomonosov. Euphemisms and metaplasm identified by Ostolopov are absent in Lomonosov’s works. In the Dictionary of Ancient and New Poetry, figures are alliteration and personification (none in Lomonosov); comparison (a “sentence figure” according to Ostolopov) also shows us an absentee dispute with Lomonosov, who attributed it to the so-called “rhetorical places”, that is, the usual methods of constructing speeches. Ostolopov’s Dictionary of Ancient and New Poetry is the first Russian dictionary of a theoretical and historical-literary type, unique for the 19th century. It became the forerunner of the 20th-century encyclopedic and terminological publications. The materials of the dictionary compiled by Nikolai Ostolopov are an important evidence and result of literary, rhetorical and linguistic disputes of the transitional (pre-Pushkin) era. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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