A.V. Nikitenko as a theorist of Russian literature (on the materials of Professor's library)

Alexander Nikitenko (1804-1877) was a Professor of Literature University of St. Petersburg, literary historian and censor. In the transition period from the scholastic rhetoric of the 18th century, using foreign and native achievements, he created courses on the theory and history of literature, and philosophy of language. In this article an attempt is made to trace the process of assimilation and repulsion from the normative rhetoric and classical poetics influenced by the ideas of philosophical aesthetics and philosophical understanding of the phenomena of language, based on the material of the personal library of A.V. Nikitenko. The mastering of works on rhetoric and theory of literature became the first stage for Nikitenko's professional work. In the book collection the whole body of texts is preserved, based on which it is possible to follow how his ideas about this science were formed. Tutorials from the end of the 18th - early 19th centuries were built on the basis of rhetoric. Nikitenko mastered and preserved in his library traditional textbooks on rhetoric by authors I.S. Rizhskiy and N.F. Koshanskiy. In his Inaugural lecture Nikitenko tried to rethink the problems of rhetoric from the point of view of the correlation of the philosophical categories of form and content. Tutorials by A.S. Nikolsky and N.I. Grech contributed to the rise of poetry and to the rethinking of the structure of literature as science. At the beginning of the 19 century, in the era of the upcoming reforms of Alexander I and social transformation, Western science began to attract intent attention of Russian society. In Russia, tutorials began to appear that used the achievements of Western European science; they were compilations of information from different areas of liberal knowledge: logic, grammar, rhetoric, aesthetics. The first manifestations of formalism in Russian aesthetics found expression in works of L. Jakob, who based on the teachings of Kant. To overcome formalist tendencies, A.V. Nikitenko used the discovery of W. Humboldt in the field of linguistics. In his student years, Nikitenko actively studied the aesthetics and poetics of classicism. In his library, works were preserved of the major theorists-classicists (J.-F. La Harpe, Ch. Batteux, J.-F. Marmontel) in Russian translation with Nikitenko's marks. The marks and comments on the margins of pages attest to Nikitenko's polemic attitude to the basic positions of classicism. By 1831 Nikitenko forms the critical attitude to the classicism theory and its basic principle of imitation of nature. The materials of A.V. Nikitenko's library indicate the serious process of adoption of normative rhetoric and classical poetics and repulsion from them in the search for new ways of literature development. Basing on the achievements of his predecessors in the field of rhetoric and theory of literature, Nikitenko was looking for new bases for the creating of a university course in literature; these bases were the inclusion of the ideas of philosophical aesthetics in the science of literature.

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