Ломоносов как эмблема русской поэзии (русские поэты XVIII века о портрете М.В. Ломоносова)

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to analyze the poetic responses of writers of the XVIIIth century to the lifetime portrait of M.V. Lomonosov in the context of interest in the emblem. Research methods are cultural-historical and semiotic. Throughout the XVIIIth century, the emblem studies were incorporated into the Russian culture; they were used as a decorative and semantic element in visual arts and as an artistic device in literature being the reflection of the emblematic way of thinking of the time. The emblematic beginning has become the focuse of attention of modern researchers of Stefan Yavorsky, A.D. Kantemir and G.R. Derzhavin. The emblematic way of thinking of the time, manifesting in the lyrical genre of the portrait caption, is believed to be unstudied. The subject of this work is the single lifetime portrait of Lomonosov to which several poets (N.N. Popovsky, V.I. Maikov, G.R. Derzhavin and N.M. Karamzin) responded in different decades of the XVIIIth century. Working in the genre of the signature to the portrait, characteristic of their era, the poets, who were successors to the ode tradition established by Lomonosov, gave an assessment to the work of their predecessor. The comparative analysis of four poems shows how the poetic perception of Lomonosov changed during the XVIIIth century. In the middle of the century Lomonosov in the cultural consciousness of the era was significant as an epic poet, as an odes writer and as a scientist while at the end of the century Lomonosov is perceived exclusively as the creator of the solemn ode. We can say that the image of Lomonosov is emblematized and becomes a sign of Russia’s rootedness in the cultural context of Europe. The poems themselves, connected with the image and thought of as captions to the portrait, become the part of the emblem. At the end of the article, a number of questions and tasks are proposed that can be used by teachers of literature during the study of the Russian literature of the XVIIIth century and the works of M.V. Lomonosov’s, in particular.