Poetics of Nikolay Lvov’s friendly epistles

Abstract

Nikolay Lvov (1753–1803) composed thirteen friendly epistles in the last decade of his life, but did not publish them. They were destined for a small audience — his close friends and relatives, including such poets as Gavriil Derzhavin, Vasily Kapnist, Fedor Lvov, Apollos Musin-Puskin, and Ivan Muravyev-Apostol. This friendly atmosphere determined the poetics of Lvov’s epistles and made them an area of bold experimentation. The poet used various meters in his epistles (mostly free iambs and trochees; also pentons, as in folk songs), he mixed lofty lexicon with colloquial expressions and dialectisms, he created small cycles and combined “incompatible” themes. In the first group of Lvov’s friendly epistles, the purest expression of friendship dominates, making them often border on the nonsensical. The second group proclaims the ideals of a nationally colored Horatianism and contains original descriptions of rural life in Russia. The article also treats the genre of friendly epistles in 18th-century Russian poetry more broadly, its history and the role of poets like Mikhail Kheraskov, Mikhail Muravyev, Gavriil Derzhavin. Special attention is devoted to the poetics and prosody of the Russian epistolary lyric.

Keywords

• eighteenth-century russian literature
• friendly epistles
• nikolay lvov
• mikhail muravyev
• gavriil derzhavin
• history of russian verse
• poetry and poetics