The Image of Naples in A.S. Pushkins creative consciousness. Article I.Political concept of Pushkins Neapolitana: «No te v Neapole shaljat…»

The series «The Image of Naples in A.S. Pushkins creative consciousness» consists of four articles, devoted to political, physicophilosophical, anthropological and mythologicalaspects of Pushkins local Neapolitan text. There has been made an attempt to reconstruct personalNeapolitan myth of Pushkin and describe Neapolitan text of his written heritage on the basis ofdirect and implied mentioning of the toponym in Pushkins texts (lyric poetry of the Southern periodand the end of 1820-s, the narrative poem «Bakhchisarai Fountain», the 10th chapter of the novel«Eugeniy Onegin», the design of a poem about Cleopatra, the tale «Egyptian Nights»). The researchwidely uses the materials of the 1810-1830-s Russian periodicals and materials of the Russian-Neapolitan travelogue of the first decades of the XIXth century (F.P. Lubyanovskiy, А.А. Shakhovskoy,V.B. Bronevskiy, N.V. Vsevolozhskiy, M.P. Pogodin, N.I. Grech and others), and also epistolarydocuments about Naples of 1820-s Russian writers.The first article is devoted to the political connotations of the toponym «Naples» in Pushkinscreative thinking. The initial moment of Naples ultimate notoriety and the first stimulus for the emergenceof a sustainable interest to Naples in the Russian society of the first decades of the XIXth centuryare connected with the Carbonaris uprising in 1820-1821. On the basis of Pushkins lyrics of the1820-1824 and Russian periodical press of 1820-1821, and mainly, political chronicles of the magazine«Vestnik Evropy» the author reconstructs probable sources of information for Pushkin about Carbonarisuprising and analyses the texts, connected with the poets attitude towards Neapolitan politicalupheavals: epistolary evidence of Pushkins awareness of Carbonaris uprising, the usage of the word«Carbonary» and its derivatives, a never published epistle , fragments «Nedvizhniystrazh dremal na tsarstvennom poroge…», «Zachem ty poslan byl I kto tebya poslal…», alsothe crisis lyrics of the 1823 («Svobody seyatel pustynniy…») and draft variants of the first chapter ofthe novel «Evgeniy Onegin», in which there have been preserved reflexes of the imagery, initiallyconnected with Pushkins idea about Neapolitan uprising: the motifs of «rebirth», «rebellious liberty»,«herd», «yoke», «freedom» and «constrain». Thus, the verbal manifestation of the imagery concept«Naples», as it first appears in Pushkin creative consciousness, possesses the initial ideological essence,which is expressed in the opposition «Liberty - Constrain». Exactly this conceptual understratumwill develop further on in Pushkins creative writing at the physicophilosophical, anthropologicaland mythological levels.

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