Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Сериа III. Филология, Vol 58, Iss 58, Pp 11-23 (2019)

Н. С. Гумилев, В. А. Жуковский, романтизм, баллада, реминисценции, русская литература, символизм, Philology. Linguistics, P1-1091, Literature (General), PN1-6790

This article makes an attempt to trace signs of Romanticism in early poetry by Nikolai Gumilev and identify those ballad features that were specifi c to his poems already according to his contemporaries’ opinion. The main source of Romantic motifs for Gumilev came to be ballads by Vasily Zhukovsky. He was very familiar with them not only because of the syllabi of educational institutions, but also from anthologies of Russian and European literature that were in his reading circle in early years. The article identifi es the texts and themes of the poet of the 19th century that were most important to Gumilev and analyses their employment both in the fi rst collections of the leader of the Acmeists (The Way of Conquistadors and Romantic Flowers) and in his more mature books. The article examines the levels of borrowing of the plots, themes and single formulae as well as the transformation of these techniques in the course of time. Besides, the article traces the evolution of Gumilev’s attitude to the motifs in question and analyses their role in the context of his literary work and the contemporary literary process, namely the interaction of these plots with prominent topics of Symbolist poetry of this period, as well as his polemic with Zhukovsky (the poet important to the modernists) and with the established literary tradition.