Forming the phenomenon of the "country estate text" of Russian literature in the poetry of Vasily Maykov and his contemporaries

Abstract

The study is devoted to the complex analysis of Vasily Maikov’s "Ode to Count Zakhar Tchernyshov...". This work can be considered one of the key poems in the process of forming the country estate poetry in Russian literature. Vasily Maykov’s poem is regarded as a literary dialogue with the works of his contemporaries – Aleksey Rzhevskiy and Mikhail Kheraskov. Vasily Maykov continues to develop motifs of peace, the golden age, the search for spiritual harmony in his "country estate" ode. The work widely represents the Masonic motifs of moral work on oneself and the sentimental motif of comprehending the world with heart rather than mind. The poet was one of the first to introduce material context into his poems, correlated with the realities of a particular country estate and the life of his contemporaries, which is connected with the leading tendency of the literature of the last third of the 18th century.