A girl at the window" and "a knock at the gates": semantics of the motives of doors and windows in Russian literature of the 1800s-1830s

In the Russian literature of the beginning of the 19th century the semantics of images of the window and the door was determined by the legacy of the sentimental phenomenology of the house space (the Horatian ideal of a secluded dwelling). But in the 1800s a young generation of poets gave it a new look, going from the scope of odes and messages to elegies. In the poetry of Zhukovsky the image of a rural house was realized in complex variations emphasising the idyllic element, like in "The Rural Cemetery", then underlining the dramatic story of patriarchy destruction, like in "Empty Villages". These interactive elegiac complexes proved to be very fruitful and, during the War of 1812, organically united with historical subjects, deepening their world modelling character ("Singer in the Camp of Russian Soldiers" and "To the Leader of the Winners" by Zhukovsky, "Ode to the Case of War with France in 1812" by Nevzorov, "A Soldier's Song" by Glinka et al.). A complex combination of idyllic, elegiac and ironical elements gave "my" images of the house by Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Delvig or the lyceum Pushkin a very dynamic appearance, in which the motives of the door and window found a number of stable modifications. One of the most fruitful was the situation of waiting for a mistress / lover at the window associated with the traditions of the "easy" love poetry ("A Window" by Pushkin, "A Dream" by Zhukovsky). In the lyrics of the 1810-1820-ies, it could generate a number of derivatives of motives, receding far from the Anacreon tradition ("On the Birthday of N" by Batyushkov, "The Prisoner" by Zhukovsky). In the elegy, the image of a girl at the window acquired a transcendent meaning and a connection with the sphere of otherness. In Pushkin's texts, for instance, the complex of motives, including darkness, moon, melancholy and excitement of a girl at the window, waiting for a meeting, was further connected to a certain type of character and was a characterological sign of an in-depth reflective female nature (Ludmila in Ruslan and Ludmila, Tatiana Larina in Eugene Onegin). There, the motive of the window consorted with the motive of the door, like in "Svetlana" by Zhukovsky. The latter proved to be in demand in the ballad genre, built on liminal plots, on the intersection of a variety of borders - spatial, ontological, ethical. The door, a knock at it, peeping, intrusion of uninvited and often horrific guests, search for a door as an exit, on the other hand, are associated with climaxes of ballads and compel the reader's attention. In the romantic version of the genre, the motive of the door is determined by the poetics of "two worlds" and embodies the crossing of the transcendent border ("Ballad that Describes How One Old Lady was Riding a Black Horse", "Smailholm Castle", "Judgment of God upon the Bishop", "Lenore", "Repentance" and other ballads by Zhukovsky). The motive of the door preserved its semantics in the romantic prose, especially in "terrible" stories, a sample of which is the cycle The Double, or My Evenings in Little Russia by A. Pogorelsky. A certain result and, at the same time, a projection to the realistic poetics is The Queen of Spades by Pushkin, where the sign of Lizaveta Ivanovna becomes her waiting at the window that emphasizes the sentimental-elegiac mood of the heroine, and the motive of Germann is the penetration into the chambers of the countess giving him infernal features; in the realistic coordinate system it is interpreted as the behavior of an impostor. In the 1830s, the semantics of the images of the door and the window found a correlation not only with the scope of ontology and ethics, but also with the social space modeling, which saturated it with household or historical projections. Thus, the window in late Pushkin's texts marks a complicated semantic complex, including the elegiac reverie, everyday moments, generational semantics and the invasion of destructive elements. In Pushkin's semantics of the door the existential beginning dominates: references to this semantics show borders important for heroes, borders they themselves or other characters cross, borders set by the system of current social barriers. As a result, the semiosphere of the door and the window from the 1810s to the 1830s transformed from a particular genre phenomenon with a constant ratio of elements in a dynamic semantic field far from stereotypes which in the author's individual poetics is able to fine-tune for the structuring of space.

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