The image of Naples in A.S. Pushkin's creative consciousness. Article 2. Landscape meridional poetry: "Who knows the land…?"

One of accidental biographical facts of Pushkin's life, namely, that the Carbonari uprising coincidedwith the early years of the poet's southern exile, found its logical aesthetic reflection in his texts.Latent thoughts about the political storms of the epoch, with the centre in the southern Mediterraneancountries (Spain, Italy, Greece), colour Pushkin's landscape sketches and panoramic elegies ofthat time, assigning a Mediterranean tint to the Crimean topos of Pushkin's poetry, and the notion"liberty" acquires a volatile southern colouring in his landscape lyrics, which combines nature descriptionof "midday lands" with lexical motifs of peace, freedom and will. The poet's location sharpenedthe intimate character of his attention to the Naples events by Pushkin's living this through in a location,which was extremely similar to that of their real occurrence: nature descriptions in the lyricaltexts of the Southern period became a metaphor of liberty as a natural human state.Since 1821 unfinished Pushkin's poems give long life to the southern local-landscape lyrical motif,which undoubtedly has something to do both with the poet's image of Naples and with the Neapolitantext of his written heritage. By the first lines of the first text, in which this motif initially appeared,it may be called by a variant-invariant formula "Kto videl kray …<...>" ("Who saw the land…<...>?"),which originated in V.A. Zhukovsky's first lines of 1817 translation from Goethe's Mignon poem: "Yaznayu kray! Tam negoy dyshit les, // Zlatoy limon gorit vo mgle dreves…". Goethe's poem gives animage of Southern Italy, which Goethe himself was likely to associate with Naples' surroundings.Thus, the inquiring-exclamatory formula of the lyrical beginning, which comprises the lexical motif"kray" (region) and was received from Zhukovsky's translation, is marked in Pushkin's Crimean lyricsby the initial genetic addiction exactly to the Italian-Neapolitan colour. But the evolution of the motifand its imagery-lexical aureole in a series of autoreminiscent texts of 1820-1830s ("Tavrida", "Yaznayu kray: tam na brega // Uedinenno more pleshchet", "Kto znaet kray, gde nebo bleshchet...","Poedem, ya gotov…", "kogda poroy vospominanye…") give evidence to the fact that Pushkin's imageof the Crimean (and southern in general) nature unconsciously reflects the Neapolitan landscapesubstratum (the panorama of the bay, dendrological symbols of the Neapolitan region: laurels, myrtles,cypresses, poplars and grapes). Gradually it finds its adequate verbal reflection in the word "rai"(Paradise) ("Eden" is a stable metaphor of the Neapolitan travelogue of the Russian word culture)which rhymes with the word "kray" in Pushkin's texts.The analysis of the imagery-lexical motifs of Pushkin's landscape lyrics of the Southern exile period,which in their remote associative context also have its freedom-liking political substratum of theNeapolitan prototype, is given at the background of typological verbal-imagery motifs of the Neapolitantravelogue of the Russian word culture, the latter represented by publications of Sh. Dupati,F.P. Lubyanovskiy, А.А. Shakhovskoy and V.B. Bronevskiy. They find its final realization in Pushkin'screative works of the Southern period in the abstract "An abstract from the letter to D.", wherethe tendency to concretisation of Italy's overall image first appears basically through Neapolitan localcode, which opens into the open text by the ethnonym "Neapolitan Lazzarone". "An abstract from theletter to D." is simultaneous to stanzas of "Onegin's travel" in which the name of Joakkino Rossini andthe lexical motif of "carelessness" also have an obvious Neapolitan associative sense.

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