THE STORY JULIA AS ONE OF KARAMZIN’S CREATIVE EVOLUTION STAGES

Abstract

The article analyzes Karamzin’s story Julia in its relation to the literary source - the novel Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - and to the late stories, written by Karamzin (A Knight of Our Times, My Confession, The Sensitive and the Cold). Comparative analysis proves that Julia is highly dependent on the Rousseau’s works, but at the same time contains all the structural elements developed in Karamzin’s later stories. Julia is a didactic story; its heroes read Heloise and Emile, comparing their actions with the instructions in these books. Disagreement with the Rousseau’s ideas is expressed not by the author, but by the heroine, while at the compositional level the Rousseauist pathos, on the contrary, is affirmed. Three late stories (A Knight of Our Times, My Confession, The Sensitive and the Cold) share a rather simple plot scheme - or content core - Rousseauist love triangle, which includes characters contrasted by the criterion of ‘sensitivity’. They should be considered as variants of one idea, because they are created at the same time, are based on the plot model from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Julie, or the New Heloise and reflect Karamzin’s divergence with Rousseau’s views. Moreover, it is noticeable that in these texts the novel structure became visible and the type of conflict situation was changed. It is not a moral choice between virtue and vice, but a conflict between the artist and the crowd, which is explained by Karamzin’s reorientation to the German novel tradition, in particular, to the genre of the Bildungsroman. This fact allows us to trace Karamzin’s creative evolution, expressed in rethinking given plot models and character schemes. A comparison of A Knight of Our Times, My Confession and The Sensitive and the Cold not with foreign sources (works of Rousseau and Goethe), but with an earlier story by Karamzin himself allows us to explicate the specific features of the period of 1799-1803.