Lappo-Danilevskii. Nikolai Novikov as a Publisher of Aleksandr Sumarokov’s Poetry

Abstract

Among other things, the outstanding enlightener Nikolai Novikov (1744 –1818) contributed to Russian culture as the editor-publisher of the Complete Works in Verse and Prose by Aleksandr Sumarokov (1781 –1782, 10 vols.; 2nd ed.: 1787, 10 vols.). It was the first attempt of publishing the complete works of a modern Russian author. A part of Sumarokov’s papers Novikov had at his disposal were lost about the time of Novikov’s arrest. The paper examines the importance of Sumarokov’s poetry published in periodicals for Novikov’s edition; in the course of the study the manuscripts of these poems (preserved in the St. Petersburg archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences) were consulted. A special attention is paid to the editorial history of Sumarokov’s eclogues. Concurrently, some aspects of later editions of Sumarokov prepared by G.A. Gukovskii (1935) and P.N. Berkov (1957) are considered.

Keywords

• eighteenth-century russian literature
• nikolai novikov
• complete works in verse and prose by aleksandr sumarokov
• g. gukovskii
• p. berkov