The development of the oeuvre of R. Burns in Russian literature of the second half of the 1850s - 1870s

The article is devoted to the synthesis and understanding of the materials that reveal the specifics of the reception of the oeuvre of Robert Burns in Russia in the second half of the 1850s-1870s. It first presents the diverse facts and information indicating the deep interest of Russian writers, translators, literary critics in the legacy of the Scottish poet. In the period under review, it was not uncommon to compare the lives and works of R. Burns and A.V. Koltsov: their inner closeness was in the effort to move away from the forms and intonations of "educated poetry", to actively use unrhymed rhythm, to picture life from a "peasant" point of view (O.F. Miller, D.I. Pisarev, I.S. Turgenev, etc.). In some cases the comparison was strengthened by the mention of the third figure, the Ukrainian poet T.G. Shevchenko, who was talented and artless in covering the folk subject in his native language (M.L. Mikhailov, V.I. Limansky, etc.). The leading Russian writers N.A. Nekrasov and I.S. Turgenev paid attention to the works of Burns, which is evidenced by numerous mentions of the Scottish poet in the editorial texts and letters, by the unrealized ideas of the article "Burns and Koltsov" (I.S. Turgenev), poetic translations of Burns (N.A. Nekrasov). Burns was of greater interest for the democratically-minded "men of the 1860s". In their perception Burns was a talented man of the people, skillfully portraying the hardships of peasant life and the light joy of being close to nature. In this regard, it is no coincidence that most of the translations of Burns in these years were made by authors close to Nekra-sov's and other democratic editions: by M.L. Mikhailov, V.S. Kurochkin, D.D. Minaev, P.I. Weinberg, and by D.V. Kostomarov in the period of his belonging to the radical "men of the 1860s". Among the translators of Burns was the "neutral" D.E. Min and the now forgotten P. Dmitriev, whose loose translation of "A Prayer" rich with religious motifs and images was found in one of the issues of a "magazine of novels and stories" Scheherazada (1858) and is first republished in this article. The author presents the broad panorama of literary and critical evaluations of the works of Burns and their Russian translations (D.I. Pisarev, M.L. Mikhailov, P.I. Weinberg, N.I. Utina, etc.) which, in addition to the identified regularities of translation reception, allows to assert that the Russian reader perceived a unilateral image of Burns as a connoisseur of people's life, a straightforward writer of the suffering and hardships, an embodiment of sincerity, openness, desire for justice, an image that fitted the contemporary Russian reality.

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