Устойчивые элементы стиля русской романтической элегии и их идейно-эстетическая функция

Abstract

The fact that the authors of a romantie elegy employ a relatively limited and unchangeable set of themes, auxiliary images for certain moods, and stylistie eonventions —in short —a specific elegiac pattern, is one of the most characteristic features of the poetics of a romantic elegy. Monotony of ornamentation with which the authors of an elegy have tied their hero, the tendency of using always the same images, repetability, triteness of their meanings, striking resemblance of lyrical composition among very many texts. all this cannot be explained by the mere fact of imitation. It is neither the problem of faint inventiveness nor poverty of imagination of the authors but the problem of social timeliness and meaning of the ideas which have found their reflexion in the elements of style of contemporary poeta. Elegiae pattern seryed special purposes: thanks to it a reader decoded an elegy not as a tale about the misery of an individual, but as sorrow over the ruthless misery of all mankind, over inevitable and nover ending injustice of fate —and this was a correct reception. Thus, to quote'after Hegel, it helped a romantic poet „to look at individual sensations and tremblings of the heart from a more general point of view.” Irrespective of the fact how important a role in a romantic elegy a given element of its stylistie structure played, such an element should not be considered separately but systematically, as a component part of a whole, in close relationship with other components of style. In the course of analysis —for instance —of P. A. Pletnev's elegy The Night one can notice that ita idea has been expressed mainly with the help of elegiac patterns, however these patterna were treated not as something to be slavishly followed but as something to be handled with subtle aesthetie intuition and mastery; the poet perfectly realized the necessity of using these means, and clearly established the proportion of their adequacy to his own creative purposes. The scholar decided that his purpose would not only be to list and elassify individual elementa of style: images, linguistic constructions, poetieal figures or particular features of lyrical composition of a romantie elegy, but to understand their aesthetic funetions. He not only wanted to explain how a given poem is bnilt but to answer why it is constructed in such a way, how it realizes its basie functions, how the real meaning shows through its mieroclements. Such an analysis finally leads to a deeper understanding of artistie synthesis, to a correct explanation of the nature of a literary work.