| Titre | Les Lettres d'Ernest et Doravre ou La mort du héros classique | |
|---|---|---|
| Auteur | Rodolphe Baudin | |
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Revue | Revue des Etudes Slaves |
| Numéro | Vol. 74, no 4, 2002 | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | Le sentimentalisme russe, sous la direction de Jean Breuillard Articles |
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| Page | 801-818 | |
| Résumé anglais |
The Letters of Ernest and Doravra or The Death of the Classical Hero
Fedor Emin's The Letters of Ernest and Doravra (1766) was very early identified as an imitation of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. Still, however similar the two texts seem to be, one can find differences in the plot or characters of the two novels. As for the characters, the main differences arise in Èmin's remodeled version of Saint-Preux: Ernest. Far from resulting from Èmin's deliberate intention to russify Rousseau's main character, the differences between the French and the Russian versions of this character are due to the resistance the intrasystemic norm of the 1760 Russian novel opposes the intersystemic influence of the French literary system to which belongs La Nouvelle Héloïse.
Indeed, in 1766, the Russian literary system's norm is still defined by the canons of the heroic and galant aesthetics, whereas the French literary system' s norm is that of rising Sentimentalism. Therefore, the main changes between Saint-Preux and Ernest result from a conflict between the heroic and the sentimental characters. As the novel goes by, Ernest, who, unlike Saint-Preux, has very much to do at the beginning with the hero of French baroque fiction, progressively turns into the sentimental Saint- Preux. Hence, the novel shows how the archaic hero of galant fiction is slowly driven out from the fiction, despite his desperate attempts to resist the influence of the sentimentalist one. Due to the rise of the first person narrative and to the multifocal organization of the epistolary novel, which allow to show the hero's negative sides, and relativises the meaning of his actions to subdue it to the way the others tell about it, this defeat of the heroic heroic is also the victory of the new hero to be emphasized by sentimental fiction from Karamzin to Radiščev: the narrator. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | https://www.persee.fr/doc/slave_0080-2557_2002_num_74_4_6847 |
