The image of Palestine in the works of V.A. Zhukovsky (Article I)

The article presents the first attempt of a systematic study of the topic of Palestine in the work of V. A. Zhukovsky. Although the Russian romantic had never been to the Holy Land, motifs and images associated with Palestine are constantly present in his poetic and prose texts. Zhukovsky turns to the topic and image of Palestine in two periods: the 1800s-1810s, the time of his "poetic" attitude to faith and the Scripture, and the 1840s, marked by the deep religiosity of the writer. In the 1800s-1810s, Zhukovsky made some prose translations connected with the Palestinian theme: The Levite of Ephraim (J.J. Rousseau), "On the Manners of the Arabs", "The Journey of Chateaubriand in Greece and Palestine" (from Record of a Journey from Paris to Jerusalem and Back by R. Chateaubriand), and a prose retelling of several chapters from The Being, the first part of the Pentateuch by Moses, compiled under the title "Biblical Stories" ("The Story of Abraham", "Isaac" and "Jacob and Esau"). In the 1840s Zhukovsky wrote such works connected with the topic and image of Palestine as The Story of Joseph the Beautiful, a transversion of the legend Joseph, a favorite son of Jacob, which continues the aesthetics and poetics of the prose Biblical Stories Zhukovsky created in the late 1810s; The Egyptian Darkness, a transversion of the Old Testament story of the penultimate plague of Egypt about the "thick darkness" spread out across all the land of Egypt for three days; the poem "A Wandering Jew", the main events taking place in the Holy Land, and a transversion of the Apocalypse. The study of these and other "Palestinian" materials in Zhukovsky's oeuvre allows specifying the particular poetics and the genre-stylistic system of his works, exploring the unknown page in the history of cultural contacts of Palestine and Russia in the 19th century and seeing the influence of Zhukovsky on the formation of the image of the Holy Land in the Russian literature of the 19th century. It opens prospects for the study of the creative dialogue of Zhukovsky with other Russian writers, especially with N.V. Gogol. It also stresses the importance of understanding of the theme and image of Palestine to realize the logic of the worldview of the first Russian romantic, who laid some of the foundations of the history of Palestinian topic perception in the Russian literature and Russian society of the first half of the nineteenth century and, more broadly, intercultural communication of this era. The author of the article finds important the connection of the Palestine topic with the pedagogical vision and practice of Zhukovsky.

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