"As Written by a Man who has Never Seen Fireworks": A Study of the Anonymous 18th Century Poem

Abstract

The article presents the text of a curious anonymous poem from a mid-18th-century manuscript, and analyses its genre and language features. Comparing the poem with the descriptions of fireworks published in the last years of Elizabeth Petrovna's reign allows us to make an assumption about the most likely date of writing and the circle of persons who could be associated with the anonymous author. The lexical features of the work, as it seems, indicate that the author was part of the circle of I.I. Shuvalov, P.I. Shuvalov and M.V. Lomonosov (which is confirmed by analysing the contents of the manuscript). The anonymous poem provides us with an understanding of how the reception of key components of court culture (fireworks, court holidays, allegorical figures, panegyric poems, etc.) looked for the noble society of the middle of the 18th century.