Басня В. А. Жуковского «Звезда и комета»: история текста и смыслы

Abstract

The aim of the research is to identify the semantic component and artistic specificity of the images of celestial bodies in V. A. Zhukovsky’s poem “The Star and the Comet”. The paper is devoted to comparing Zhukovsky’s fable with a German source and considering the movement of poetic thought from the draft to the final version of the text; the mechanisms underlying the transformation of visible pictures of the universe into an artistic image with a high emotional impact are determined. The scientific novelty of the research consists in clarifying the factual basis of Zhukovsky’s writing of the fable “The Star and the Comet”, considering the creative history of the poem, interpreting it not only as a loose translation of the poetic study by Gottlieb Konrad Pfеffеl, but also as a result of superimposing the author’s own experimental observations of the movement of celestial bodies on the German source, which expands the understanding of cosmic imagery features in the aesthetics of Russian Romanticism. As a result of the research, the functional spectrum of the images of celestial bodies in Zhukovsky’s poem “The Star and the Comet” has been determined, the ratio of the national to the universal in these images has been revealed. Through textual and cultural-historical commentary, the mechanisms of poetic embodiment of the cosmos model as a fragment of the national worldview are traced, Zhukovsky’s handwritten materials are analyzed in relation to the intellectual realities of the 1820s.