This voice was familiar..." The archetype of the ballad genre in the historical context: imposture

The author of the article attempts to historicize the genre archetype of the Russian ballad, which, since the time when this genre emerged in the Russian belle letters, the poets insistently involved into the discussions on the theme of national identity. The starting point for the analysis is the chronological coincidence of Vasily Zhukovsky's awoken interest towards ballads and the collisions of Napoleonic wars - a factor that determined the rhythm of the subsequent genre actualizations at times of historical cataclysms (revolutions, civil and Great Patriotic wars, Russian emigration). It should be noted that the plots of early Russian ballads are based on the distinct interaction between the associative fields symbolizing power, domesticity and status - the pivotal constructions for the "imposture" historical myth. As it is shown in the article, Zhukovsky's practice of ballad-writing reveals the confluence of historical and poet's personal perspectives. One of the influential tendencies of Napoleon's image perception by the Russian society lay in the associative approximation of the French Emperor with impostors - actors of the 17th- and 18th-century Russian history. As it is shown in the analysis of ballads and verses written by Zhukovsky on Bonaparte, the image of the Grande Armee leader occupies the functional position of the ballad-like dead fiance, whereas the genre-building juxtaposition of living vs. dead transformed into the conflict of legitimate vs. illegitimate. The poet's reflection of the dramatic relationship between him and Maria Protasova, who could not become his official bride due to their close kinship (by Maria's family Zhukovsky was seen as bastard-son) was a significant contribution to the elaboration of a paradigmal ballad plot. Zhu-kovsky's diaries, correspondence and verses dedicated to his beloved became an authentic biographic commentary to the ballads which the poet started to compose in synchronicity with the outbreak of his feelings towards Maria. The conflict intrinsic to the future Zhukovsky's ballad was worked out in these autobiographical texts and private documents separating here into two main scenarios of the heroine's behavior: riot and resignation ("earthly way") depicted in "Lyudmila" and "Svetlana" respectively. The author tried to argue that the poet's elaboration of the Russian ballad was not, in fact, the refusal from writing a national epos (poema), which was long-awaited from Zhukovsky by his milieu, but the original artistic solution of this literary problem. The ballad, in the best way possible, responded the challenges of this historical epoch - to depict and to comprehend the national history at a specific viewing angle. However, the solution presented by Zhukovsky not so much actualized the material, authentic in historical terms, as it discovered the Russian national history's peculiarities in the typological perspective - as a repetitive standoff of legitimate and illegitimate forces defined concretely in an utmost personal and psychological focus of a ballad. In this way the latter was organically morphing into a "form of time" whereas one of the plots in which the genre found its nourishment was the Russian imposture - a most representative plot-situation, in which the collision with an illegitimate force played a structure-forming role.

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