Studia Litterarum (Jun 2017)
LERMONTOV ROMANTICISM AND JENA SCHOOL. Part 2
Abstract
This article examines the understudied subjects of Lermontov life and work: his stay This article examines the understudied subjects of Lermontov life and work: his stay at the Moscow noble boarding school and his direct engagement in Cepheus, a literary annual run by the literary circle of Raich, where Lermontov’s first poem, “Thoughts, Ex tracts, and Reflections…” was published. The author proves the authorship of Lermontov’s “Thoughts…” that had been included in the sixth volume of the academic edition of his works under the category of “Dubia” but had been excluded from many later editions. Close reading of “Thoughts...” and a comparative study of selected fragments with Le rmontov’s letters to M. A. Shan-Girey demonstrate that even this early essay drawing on tological differences between the principles of classicism and Romanticism bears the im print of the Early Romantic aesthetics. The analysis reveals typological similarities between “Thoughts…” and the ideas of Jena school that were most fully manifested in the writings of brothers Schlegel brothers thoroughly studied in the literary circle of Raich. In a section devoted to aesthetic views of S. E. Raich, the author disagrees with those researchers who consider him to be either archaist or classicist and claims that he was an adept of Jena school rather than a “neopetrarchist.” Ideas discussed in the circle and during the lectures influenced the young poet as his future work testifies. Within the period of 1829-1831, he published a Byronic poem “June 11, 1831,” on the one hand, and a poem “Angel” that echoes the ideas of Wackenroder, on the other hand. If for Raich, a combination of these two conflicting Romantic schools was inconceivable, for young Lermontov, it was a natural outcome of his apprenticeship period since each school offered him the means to under stand the essence of Romantic method as such.
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