Traditional and innovative in the poetics of I. S. Nikitin (to the 200th anniversary of the birth)

Abstract

The article examines I. S. Nikitin’s poetics from the point of view of its continuity in relation to the achievements of his predecessors, lyric poets, and those original features the poet himself developed. The main method is an end-to-end textual analysis of I. S. Nikitin’s poetry collection in the unity of content and form. Additionally, the study used the research methods of linguistic stylistics, linguistic poetics, semasiology, and structural-semantic syntax. The metrical features of poetic texts are given in the interpretations of M. L. Gasparov’s school. Though I. S. Nikitin considered A. V. Koltsov his immediate teacher, his poems contain noticeable images, motifs, and linguistic reminiscences referring to other poets’ creative work, especially A. S. Pushkin’s. I. S. Nikitin creatively interpreted certain Pushkinian linguo-poetic techniques (the antithesis of vice–virtue in the reflection on the role of the poet and poetry, the illustrative comprehension of canonical Christian texts, the realistic use of the ballad and idyll genres, the patriotic pathos of civic poems, the use of classical metrical schemes, and others). I. S. Nikitin made a significant contribution to improving the artistic language of Russian realist poetry. He developed the song genre in literature, introduced a variety of dramaturgical principles into lyric poetry, and proposed original compositional schemes for philosophical, social, and landscape poems. In his writings, I. S. Nikitin refined the poetic syntax of homogeneous constructions. Moreover, he extended the motivic boundaries of Russian lyric poetry through elaboration and precise observations, as well as enriched the linguo-stylistic repertoire of its vocabulary. I. S. Nikitin’s work is organically, closely, and versatilely connected with the content and language development of Russian poetry in the second half of the 19th century.