An Essay on Russian Grammar by Vasily Zhukovsky

A work on Russian Grammar Vasily Zhukovsky wrote in French -“Esquisse de grammaire russe” (An Essay on Russian Grammar) - is of undoubted interest for the history of teaching the Russian language. It should also be considered as a vivid example of the presence of the author’s personality on the pages of the textbook and as a reflection of a significant stage of the poet’s creative biography. The Essay contains references to the images of Zhukovsky’s poetry, to the realities of life and the circle of ideas that connected the poet with the royal court, and in this it is an organic part of the complex of teaching aids the poet developed in the late 1810s -early 1820s for the future Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Printed in the form of a book with an appendix of ten tables, at first glance, the Essay contains a “dry” set of grammatical rules, but, on closer inspection, it turns out to be saturated with poetic imagery. The examples used in the Essay are of the greatest interest: at a certain moment, in addition to the utilitarian purpose of illustrating the rule, they acquire a poetic purpose, become carriers of the figurative principle. Examples of Russian phrases and phrases that are clearly visually isolated in the flow of the French-language presentation of the rules on some pages are formed into thematic blocks that have an obvious plot-figurative and emotional coloring. The first thematic block is formed around the central image of the rose, which has an incredible symbolic richness in the context of the biography of Alexandra Feodorovna and the cult of the memory of her mother, Queen Louise of Prussia. The second thematic block is formed around the image of reading; the third combines the images of love and dislike, the king, happiness and unhappiness. The fourth block develops the idea of communication, from neutral to close friendly. The publication has not been dated, and by now the dating of the Essay (1818) is based on the analysis of filigrees showing this date as the lower boundary, on comparing it with handwritten grammatical tables, and on mentions of work on tables in Zhukovsky’s correspondence. The themes of the examples correlate with later events in the poet’s creative biography and, perhaps, with their more detailed comparison, the dating will turn out to be later. At this stage of the study, the general patterns that can be traced within each block are obvious. In addition to the unity of the main theme, this is the development of a plot, even if it does not have clear outlines, but still a tangible plot. Each block has an obvious and at the same time complex emotional coloring; it is accentuated by repetitions, at first glance due only to the illustrative task of examples, but clearly in need of a special study, taking into account the importance of repetition as a poetic device, which Zhukovsky repeatedly uses in poems of this period. The special role of the first block, which opens the second part of the Essay, is obvious, its compactness and saturation with individual associations that the teacher shares with his student. Each block is dialogical: the interlocutors are present behind the phrases of the examples quite clearly; the teacher and the student are united by the increasing intimacy towards the end of the block. At the moment, the first and second blocks seem to be the most semantically dense, i.e., they are the least blurred by the need to give examples that clearly illustrate the necessary rules, but random from the point of view of the figurative logic of the block. On the other hand, it is quite possible that, with a deeper study, examples that now seem random will find their explanation. In view of the poet’s well-known desire for universal connectivity, for building semantic networks, such an assumption seems justified. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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