Development paths of national literature and the formation of the romantic criticism style in A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s papers (to the 225th anniversary of the birth)

Abstract

The paper presents a holistic view of the main literary critical articles written by A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the most influential representative of Russian Romanticism. The aim is to identify the main trajectories of the linguistic and stylistic influence of Bestuzhev’s critiques on the further fate of this genre of Russian opinion journalism. The research focused on the critic’s observations about the development of Russian literature and language as well as the writer’s individual style. The study employed integrating and comparative methods in conjunction with linguo-stylistic text analysis. Bestuzhev understood romanticism as a course of progressive development and improvement of literature and language. Consequently, he devoted much attention to the analysis of the previous experience of world and Russian literature. The paper examines the most interesting observations made by the writer and the contribution of Bestuzhev the theorist to understanding Russian literature evolution. The development paths included democratising the literary language, enriching it with means of different layers of live speech, defining the requirement for literary historicism, i. e. the congruence between the language of an artwork and the language of the era of the depicted events. The linguistic and stylistic devices used in Bestuzhev’s critical texts were identified. These include the use of a vast repertoire of lexical units, elaborate metaphors, a variety of similes and parallel constructions, rhythmical and emotionally charged syntactic constructions. The paper also examines the specific features of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s occasional word formation and the devices of irony and a language game he used. In addition, the research explored the writer’s preference for aphoristic language and his attempts to overcome the established language standards with respect to archaic vocabulary (poeticisms) and borrowings.