Post-Rhetorical Model of the “Estate Text” and Its Transformation in Fet’s Poetry

Abstract

The aim of this article is to highlight the stages and the tendencies in the development of the so called “estate text” in the poetry of the 19th century. Namely, it shows how a new invariant model developed at the turn of the 18th and 19th century and how it was transformed in the work of A.A. Fet. The article studies the key features of the new elegiac model at semantic, syntaxic, and pragmatic levels and examines how the model was integrated in Fet’s poetry. I argue that Fet excludes biographical, literary, and historical contexts of the estate topos and continues its interiorization initiated by the poets of the early 19th century. The opposite trend is to be found in the works of Fet’s contemporaries, where the estate topos accumulates cultural memory and actualizes the genre of ruistic elegy that describes ancient dilapidated estates and neglected gardens and that was developed at the beginning of the 19th century (A.K. Tolstoy, A.N. Maykov). In the second part of the 19th century, a number of literary tendencies influenced on the estate poetry. They include prosaization of poetic forms (that resulted in either acceptance of prosaic influence or distancing from it); polemics between “realists” and supporters of “pure art”; the phenomenon of “solitary consciousness” and attempts to overcome it. Extra-literary prerequisites are associated with the peasant reform that caused the ruin of the so called “noble nests” or a change in the socio-historical conditions of their functioning.

Keywords

• supertext
• “estate text”
• semiosphere
• semantics
• syntactics
• pragmatics
• a.a. fet.