V.A. Zhukovsky and A.V. Nikitenko: the history of personal and creative relationship

The article presents personal and creative relationship between Zhukovsky and Nikitenko as a specific semiosphere based on the history of their lifetime meetings and creative cooperation. Using the material of two private libraries as well as their correspondence and diaries, we follow the steady interest of critic and literary historian A.V. Nikitenko to the personality and works of V.A. Zhukovsky, the first Russian romanticist. Nikitenko's library still has six editions of Zhukovsky and an illustrated album, two of them with inscriptions which testify to the friendly relations of the great Russian poet and the professor of literature. The diary entries show that three plots acquire a special life-creating value: joint activity on the perpetuation of the memory of A.S. Pushkin, Zhukovsky's assistance in the liberation from serfdom of Nikitenko's brother and mother, and Nikitenko's active participation in the publication of the posthumous works of the great Russian poet and friend. In his critique of Stikhotvoreniya V. Zhukovskogo [V. Zhukovsky's Poems] (1836), Nikitenko appreciates the value of Zhukovsky's poetry for the Russian public and artistic consciousness. The critic consistently develops the idea of a new direction in poetry that shows the "wealth of the national language", and marks the contribution of the first Russian romanticist to the development of the prose style, drawing the reader's attention to the essays "Rafaeleva madonna" [Raphael's Madonna], "Puteshestviye po Saksonskoy Shveytsarii" [A Journey through Saxon Switzerland] "Otryvki pisem iz Shveytsarii" [Excerpts of letters from Switzerland]. The main pathos of the whole creative biography of Zhukovsky and Nikitenko is a consistent statement of idealism as a philosophy of modern spiritual life and verbal culture. Zhukovsky sharply raised the problem of the inextricable connection of the good, morality and beauty in Russian aesthetics and criticism. In his poems of 1814-1824, which can rightly be called aesthetic manifestos, the poet consistently introduces the anthropology and ontology of kalokagathia philosophy in the space of beauty. Through the image-symbol "spirit of pure beauty" Zhukovsky creates a special type of symbolic thinking; the image receives the status of aesthetic citizenship in the essay "Rafaeleva madonna" [Raphael's Madonna] and reflects the state of the propagation of the soul. For Nikitenko the concept-image of the soul is the psychological basis of idealism, but in his critical and aesthetic quest he tries to see "ordinary and natural forms". After Zhukovsky's death, Nikitenko wrote the article "Vasily Zhukovsky, On His Poetic Nature and Activities" (1853), in which he talks about the synthesis of the national and the universal in the poet's works. The idea of Zhukovsky's moral influence on Russian social life and literature develops and specifies through the constantly emerging historical and literary parallel Zhukovsky - Pushkin. Nikitenko's idealism was not an escape from reality, from the spirit of the time and social and philosophical trends, it is an organic part of his "historical criticism" system as a stage of the problem of relation of art to reality.

Keywords

Authors

References