Статья А. П. Сумарокова «Российский Вифлеем» в апрельском номере «Трудолюбивой пчелы» (1759): к проблеме определения жанра

Abstract

The authors of the article adhere to the theory of ensemble structure of the first private Russian monthly magazine “The hardworking bee”. All ten sections of the April issue form a meta-text, the core of which consists of three Sumarokov’s essays of poetic character: “About Disagreement”, “About Difference between Ardent and Acute mind”, “About Unnaturalness”, which manifest the view of the magazine’s publisher on the nature of art, on the concept of literary taste, on the ratio of rhetoric and poetics in the verbal art, on the connection between reality and art. The article “Russian Bethlehem” refers to the semantic periphery of the April book of the journal. The function of this publication in the issue remained unclarified during the entire period of its study, and the article itself was usually regarded as a pseudo-historical work. The concept of the journal as a metatext, i. e. the syntagmatic connection of all 12 books of the “The hardworking bee” and the paradigmatic organization of each particular issue, made it possible to define the genre of Sumarokov’s essay “Russian Bethlehem” as a contaminated parody of the following genres: а prosaic panegyric, a historical composition and a gala ode. Prior to Sumarokov, only poetry — the poetry of individual authors — was parodied. The writer was the first to create a parody contamination of poetic and prose genres. Sumarokov himself could be a parodic personality — in this case, the essay is an autoparody, the aim of which is to show the readers the text created by the quirk of an ardent mind, not striving for perspicacity, but driven only by fervor. The second object of the parody could be M. V. Lomonosov and his two writings: “Ancient Russian history from the beginning of the Russian people to the death of Grand Duke Yaroslav the First or until 1054” (1754–1758) and “A word of praise to the blessed and eternally worthy of the memory of Emperor Peter the Great... ” (1755), as well as the entire complex of rhetorical locus communis of Lomonosov’s odes. Sumarokov evaluated the poetic qualities of his opponent’s writings extremely low, and later wittily parodied his odes on the pages of “The hardworking bee”.