Sergey Petrov's "Derzhavin. Life in Zvanka" and Gavrila Derzhavin's "To Yevgeny. Life in Zvanka": A Dialogue with the Proto-Text

The article presents a comparison of two poems, "To Yevgeny. Life in Zvanka" by Gav-rila Derzhavin and "Derzhavin. Life in Zvanka" by Sergey Petrov. The purpose of the comparison is to determine the means and character of Petrov's interpretation of the image of the poet in Derzhavin's masterpiece. Apart from the two poems as the main material of the study, the discussion of the problem of the dialog with Derzhavin and his heritage involves works by such Russian poets of the 20th and 21st centuries as D. Samoylov, B. Akhmadulina, M. Su-khotin, and T. Kibirov. The comparison of the two poems is performed with the use of a com-parative-juxtapositional method, and their analysis employs structural-semantic and contextual methods. The methodological bases of the study are the concept of dialogical being of literature developed by M. Bakhtin and the theory of the work of art's integrity by the Donetsk philological school (M. Girshman et al.). The course of the research, with its object of revealing similarities and dissimilarities between the two Derzhavin images, is set to solve the specific problems concerned with the themes and poetics of the two texts. The poems are Derzhavin's epistolary dialogs whose addressee is his biographer and confidant Yevgeny Bolkhovitinov. By pretendedly (histrionically) dodging from the poem's scene as its architect, Petrov manages to create an objectivized, as that of a play character's, image of Derzhavin, reinforced by quotational insertions from the latter's "Life in Zvanka" that mark its thematic motifs. These are introduced selectively, in an axiological configuration that is different from that of Derzhavin's poem. Among all the set of Derzhavin's motifs, many are left out (e.g., that of posthumous fame), others are preserved, but presented in a different, predominantly polemical vein, such as courtly subservience and poetic service. In a bathetic tone, an erotic motif is introduced, peripheral in memoirs and absent in Derzhavin's poem. This motif is additionally mingled with that of gluttony, only casually recalled by the old poet's household members and touched upon in his "Life in Zvanka" but in a moderately hedonistic way. Pe-trov's ironic treatment of the motifs he selected and introduction of some new ones travesty the poet's image making it a parodical double of both Derzhavin as an image created in "Life in Zvanka" and the real, biographical Derzhavin as imprinted in the memoristic literature. This summary of the two poems' analytical comparison quite correlates with the mode of the present day's dialog with the literary tradition. The originality of Petrov's poem consists in the circumstance that, here, the aged Derzhavin creates a new version of "Life in Zvanka", in this manner engaging, as it were, in a polemic with his own proto-text and "personally" participating in the debunking of the time-honored image of himself as it has formed over the centuries in the literary consciousness.

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