“CHTO ZH! STAKAN DERZHA VINA // VYP’IEM ZA...”: ABOUT DERZHAVIN IN RUSSIAN POETRY

Abstract

The article deals with mentions of the name of Gavriil Derzhavin in Russian poetry in 1790-2023. In the poems, the singer of Felitsa appears not only as an outstanding original poet, but also as a lover of truth, a statesman, a representative of the Catherine the Great era, and finally, a friend and acquaintance of his peers and the idol of the young Pushkin and Delwig. In later texts, the image of the real Derzhavin, as we know him from sources, including autobiographical Notes, becomes more and more blurred. Some hypostases of Derzhavin attract poets more often (poet and statesman), others are much less common (a friend of some of his contemporaries), some are not mentioned at all (literary theorist or the author of the mentioned Notes). Such a choice also influences the formation of the image of the poet among the general readers (for example, in the 20th century, one of the favorite plots is the description of the meeting between Derzhavin and Pushkin at the Lyceum, which is clearly related to the importance of this episode in Pushkin’s biography, but not in that of “old Derzhavin”), and among other poets. Avant-garde poets represent Derzhavin in their texts in their own way. Very few poets pay attention to the formal features of Derzhavin’s poems. Sometimes voluminous quotes from his work are included in poems by later authors (for example, by K. Ryleev and K. Simonov). A new poem by German Lukomnikov, lines from which are included in the title of this work, is considered separately: Derzhavin’s name is not mentioned in the text, the poet’s unspoken surname is encrypted in a compound rhyme.