Caucasian Text In Russian Literature: Myths And History In Poetics

Abstract

The article addresses studying the historical and literary phenomenon, a Caucasian text in the Russian literature and culture. This problem is relevant for scholars working in various fields of knowledge: literary critics, historians, ethnographers, folklorists. The study shows that the Caucasus took a special place in life and work of the Russian literature artists. The purpose of the article is to highlight different aspects of the Caucasus theme in literature, to designate the Caucasian topos, a special space in the writers works. It also reveals how to interact with the national images of the world. In this regard, the term ‘topica’ is introduced. The object of the paper is the “Caucasian text” in the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The national topic finds its expression mainly in myth, folklore, which was under tight consideration by the poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. The necessity of textual analysis in literary, folkloristic, ethnographic aspects is substantiated. It is emphasized that special attention should be paid to the Caucasian axiology (in its various national versions), manifested both in mythological representations and in folklore as well: with the inclusion of mythologies in the literary text one can observe an evolving ‘topic’. In this respect, the texts of Lermontov (prose) and Mayakovsky (poem) are most indicative, in whose work folklorism, principally the national one, appeared in the latent form. This allows speaking about the organic inclusion of the national elements in poetics, but not about stylization and borrowing.