Sculptural codes of Russian literature: on the history of perception of the monument to V. A. Zhukovsky

The paper analyses how places of memory dedicated to V. A. Zhukovsky were emerging in Russian sculpture and urban toponymy. The object of research is examined in historical and cultural documents which refer to the turn of the 19-20th centuries. They reflect the debates about locating of monuments and renaming the streets after Zhukovsky. Also, the author studies some works of the Russian authors which contain the images of Zhukovsky’s busts and streets named after him. The analysis involves the jubilee periodicals, K. Fofanov’s manuscripts and publish- ed verses, the poem by V. Mayakovsky, the oeuvres of I. Ilf, E. Petrov and D. Kharms. The famous authors’ allusions on Zhukovsky (just discovered as well as earlier revealed by scholars) are used in the present study. The paper studies the regularities of formation and rethinking of Zhukovsky’s professional reputation as a national classic and the mentor of a crown prince Alexander Nikolayevich. On the one hand, the installation of monuments in honor of Zhukovsky supported some family and local myths, and on the other hand, Zhukovsky’s charisma became the significant part of the imperial culture and symbolic space of Saint Petersburg. The latter is particularly important because there were no monuments dedicated to Zhukovsky in Moscow. Zhukovsky’s bust located near the Winter Palace became not only the constituent part of the canonization of the classical writer as a cultural strategy but was also embodied as a motif in a number of Russian literary pieces. Most of the literary allusions actualizing the artificial images of the inanimate substitutes of the poet (e. g. monuments and streets named after him) refer to the imperial capital in particular: the bust modeled by Kreitan and Zhukovsky Street. The history of appearance and perception of places of memory associated with Zhukovsky finally becomes the important marker for conceptualizing the Russian classical writers’ pantheon. It clarifies not only the process of formation of Zhukovsky’s personal professional reputation in a broad scale of historical time, but also the dynamics of the Russian literature inner self-consciousness. The authors at that time were attracted by the places of memory representing new literary cults as the primary objects for cultural reflection along with biographies and oeuvres of their precursors.

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