Zhukovsky's way from Russian idyll to Russian story: rural topos

The article describes the origin and evolution of rural topos in the works of the first Russian romanticist. Developing the sentimentalist tradition of depicting rural people following the findings of Nikolay Karamzin and Alexander Radishchev Zhukovsky broadens the space of the rural topos as a peculiar space of the soul. In his poetry through the larger space of the soul, through lyrical suggestion he managed to hear the music of the Russian village as a substance of national being. The impetus for interpretation of this topos as landscape realia was the home places of the poet -Tula Region, Mishchenskoye, Muratovo and Dolbino villages. The image of Mishchenskoye in his elegy ''Evening'', Muratovo poetic cycle of the beginning of the 1810s, Dolbino poems of 1814 are not only the autobiographical implication of Zhukovsky's rural poems, but also a concept of life construction that is connected with it. These are certain poetic models that form physicophilosophical, anthropological and ontological principles of the Russian world. Life construction includes Zhukovsky's lyric poetry; in his elegies, idylls, messages he works out a peculiar poetic language. Its basis is attentive watching and listening to the surrounding rural life. The sounds of the brook, breeze and oak woods, ''native hills'', ''skies and clear waters'', ''birds singing sweet songs'', ''last ray of dawn'' - Zhukovsky places all these realia of the rural topos into the world of poetic reflection and a special verse melody. The two periods of this process are the two translations of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". From 1802 to 1839 the poet passes all the characteristic stages on this way, which are inseparably connected with the general aesthetic identity formation of the national art, with the ideas of the national character in the verbal culture. Zhukovsky's ''Rural Cemetery'' that Vladimir Soloviev, an outstanding Russian philosopher, described as ''the beginning of a truly human poetry in Russia'' did not only define the rural topos, the rural text, but also showed its inclusion in the consciousness of Russian people and its polysemantics. Zhukovsky's Russian ballads, rural poems, translation of O. Goldsmith's ''The Deserted Village'', Russian idylls, his reflections on peasants' education, the scope of his educating activities as the tutor of the cesarevitch, the pictures of rural landscapes became ''the form of the time'', an organic part of the Russian social and philosophical thought, and the first step in the interpretation of rural life as a phenomenon of the Russian historical and literary process. It is impossible to understand the progress of Russian literature to ''The Village'' by Pushkin, ''Russian Songs'' by Koltsov, ''Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka'' by Gogol and Nekrasov's poetry without the discoveries of ''the Columbus of Russian romanticism in poetry.'' The first-time published archive texts of Zhukovsky's rural life stories in prose allow seeing the direction of his experiments in integrating the fiction text with the journalistic and pedagogical discourses.

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