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Sensibility In The Frosty North Russian Enlightenment and Sentimentalism The authors of Russian Sentimentalism associated sensibility with the specifics of Russian national character, national history and the organization of Russian society. First of all, they felt impelled to disprove contemporary stereotypes of Russian man as deprived of feeling. Secondly, they considered themselves agents of Peter the Greaťs reforms and saw the spread of sensibility as part of the Enlightenment of Russia. Furthermore, they asserted that sensibility, and not noble birth, should be the basis for social recognition: the authors of Russian Sentimentalism understood Peter's meritocratic ideals in the spirit of a sentimental utopianism. Moreover, they linked the spread of sensibility in Russia with the idea that Russian culture was still in its primary stage: Russian literature appeared as the result of the Enlightenment of feeling. Therefore, Sentimental authors thought of themselves as Russia's first true poets.

"Блаженство не в лучах порфира" : The History and Function of Tranquillity (spokoystvie) in Eighteenth-Century Russian Thought and Poetry From Kantemir to Sentimentalism Based on a survey of the period' s poetic repertory and a corpus of little examined philosophical texts, the article draws several interrelated conclusions about the importance of tranquility (pokoj / spokoj stvie) from Kantemir to Sentimentalism. Within the Russian philosophical and literary tradition of sensibility and sentimentalism, tranquility emerges as a fundamental component of the concept of happiness. The article examines the evolving use of the term over the period, and shows how its increasing importance derives from its place in philosophical, psychological and medical theories of sensibility that are central to literary identity, especially in poetry.

Russian Sentimentalism and Freemasonry The spreading of Sentimentalism in Russia coincides with a period of great activity in Masonic lodges, notably the one made up of the circle formed around N. I. Novikov during the years 1770-1780. In spite of their divergences with Freemasons, writers such as M. N. Murav'ev, N. M. Karamzin or A. N. Radiščev felt their profound moral influence. Ail these men were interested in the same issues (the attention paid to 'the inner man', the celebration of friendship — this 'sacred union of souls' — , the pursuit of happiness). Freemasonry and Sentimentalism constitute two separate worlds, which maintained close contacts but did not merge and sometimes conflicted while being sources of mutual enrichment.

Chateaubriand and Karamzin as Witnesses of Their Time The paper compares N. M. Karamzin' s Russian Traveller's Letters (1801) with An Essay on Revolutions (London, 1797) [Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la révolution française de nos jours] by F. R. de Chateaubriand (London, 1797). Both works were written by the same period and are now examined from different points of view: politics, history, literature. Rather surprisingly, they have much in common: both refer to ancient Greek and Roman history in order to assess present-day events; they share the idea that the French Revolution was inescapable and remains irreversible; they reckon the French Revolution and contemporary England played a leading role; strangely enough revolutionary leaders (Cromwell, Robespierre, Marat) are highly regarded; utopian views in political matters are strictly rejected; any existing gap between the age of Enlightenment and previous periods is denied; both writers show a similar awareness of the importance of time-lag and that it had taken several century-old efforts and sufferings to build Europe as it was. While traveling around Europe (1789-1790) Karamzin discovered that freedom needed to be fought - and sacrificed for, by nations and such a painstakingly acquired freedom determines each people's achievement in civilization and its economic prosperity. As for Chateaubriand he searched a key for European history through going back to the time when the Christian religion was being spread. The paper points out at how much both pieces of literature express a common typology. It also underlines dissimilarities between both writers (in their appraisal of contemporary England and of the role played by Christianity in European history, etc.). Later on, each author's major work (Karamzin's A History of the Russian State and Chateaubriand' s The Genius of Christianity) which young writers and poets from the two countries will abundantly feed from, emphasized divergence in ideology and arts. Whereas Chateaubriand epitomized religion as the only bastion against the reign of money-based profit, Karamzin kept confident in moderate deism and definitively rejected aesthetic apologia of Christianity.

Poor Liza by N. M. Karamzin and Female Suicide in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature The paper studies the constituting of European liberal project 'choice' and 'responsibility' in 18-th century Russian Literature through the problem of female death, as been referenced in N. M. Karamzin's short novel Poor Liza. The heroine's suicide is interpreted in the author's complex intertextual dialogue with such emblematic novels as Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Poor Liza is an important part of this European context and is seen as one of the first Russia's 'European' literary works, as far as Karamzin changes in that dialogue the code of female suffering. On the other hand the paper analyses the development of the theme in A. Ostrovsky's drama The Storm and in L. Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina and it is shown that the suicide (interpreted as a gender opposition between women and men) transforms the sign of female body from a victim into a moral victor.

Nikolaj Karamzin's Linguistic Thought It is a commonplace to say that French prose influenced the stylistic reform which led to the 'new Russian style' [novyj slog] defined and critized by Admiral A. S. Šiškov as early as 1803. In comparison the strictly theoretical sources of the Karamzinian reform have been largely ignored, except in V. V. Vinogradov and V. D. Levin's works — still relevant today — and particularly in B. A. Uspenskij's work, published in 1985, Fragments of Literary Russian History in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries : Karamzin's Linguistic Programme and Its Historical Roots, which studies the link between Karamzinism and French preciosity (Vaugelas in particular). This paper intends to show that Karamzin was influenced by linguists and philosophers much closer to his own time. Studying Karamzin within the framework of the linguistic thinking of his time, it shows that sensualism, the underlying philosophy behind sentimentalist aesthetics, also represents the theoretical basis of sentimental writing.

F. N. Muravieva — Theona : Reality and a Sentimentalist Literary Myth The article focuses on the figure of Fedos'ja Nikitična Murav'eva (1760?-1792), sister of the Russian Sentimentalist writer Mixail Murav'ev, to whom he wrote numerous letters and dedicated several literary works (addressing her as Theona). After characterizing her cultural profile on the basis of many unpublished documents, it shows how the epistolary dialogue with her influenced Murav'ev's stylistic and literary choices. It sets the problem of the psychological and culturological meaning of the brother-sister relationship and of its turning into a fact of literary significance, and makes some hypotheses about the choice of the literary name of Theona, that allows to enrich the picture of the 'feminization' of Russian literature brought about by Sentimentalism.

The Time as a Creation of the Sensibility in A. N. Radiščev's Journey This paper tries to show that Radiščev in his Journey does not organize the time of his narration in an objective and rational manner. In this highly sentimental book the time appears to be a creation of the traveller's feeling. The author has an obvious predilection for the temporal categories which lie outside the present, so that his hero can escape to the hard reality he watches. In spite of an apparent similarity, Radiščev's look at the future differs from an utopian vision. For him the future is mainly a shelter from surrounding world ills, which offers the hero an opportunity to lyrical effusions. So is the poetic function of the past, used by the traveller as a theme of elegiac meditation. The cyclic conception of the universe, evocated in several chapters of the Journey, unifies both of the forms of the unreal time (past and future) in an endless oscillation of the cosmic pendulum.

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.

The Russian Amazon : Subversive Features of an Early Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Heroine This paper introduces and analyses a counter-example to the received notion of a uniformity in the portrayal of sentimental heroines in the early nineteenth century. With reference to the work of Vinogradov, Levin and Uspenskij on the phenomenon of feminization and of Kelly and Hammarberg on the formation of a 'feminine canon', I suggest that the literary image of the idealized woman is still very much in the making during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The anonymous novel The Russian Amazon, or The Heroic Love of a Russian Woman (1809) provides an interesting example of an unconventional portrayal of a positive female character and effectively contradicts many of the staple features of the sentimental heroine. Oľga, the 'Russian amazon' of the title, is a gentlewoman whose sentimental attachments and patriotic feelings lead her away from the idyllic setting of her father's home. In order to follow her fiancé, Oľga cross-dresses as a man and joins the Russian army in the 1806-7 campaigns against Napoleon. The adventures of this unlikely sentimental heroine span from her heroic deeds in the battlefield and the hazardous libération of her fiancé from the French, to the explicit description of a string of sexual attacks that Oľga endures. In the idyllic ending the 'Russian amazon', who has eventually abandoned her combative persona, returns to the paternal home and marries her fiancé, thus fully reconciling herself with the socially acceptable role of dutiful daughter and wife. The duality of this heroine — sentimental and adventurous — is also reflected at a stylistic level where modes typical of 'high' sentimental prose coexist with patterns borrowed from popular eighteenth-century genres, including the picaresque narrative and the novel of adventure. As this paper demonstrates, by encompassing Oľga' s warfare and erotic adventures within the framework of the idyll-type story the author attempts to graft features of this transgressive heroine onto 'the' early nineteenth-century model for cultivated prose fiction: Sentimentalism.

From Rococo to Sentimentalism : The First Three "Lyrical Cycles" by Franciszek Dionizy Knjaźnin (1749/1750-1807) Franciszek Dionizy Knjaźnin, a virtuoso of versification and verbal paradox, a remarkable translator and adapter of ancient poetry, deserves attention as a master in the arrangement of his poetry books. The study analyses his transition from Rococo to Sentimentalism by comparing the composition of his enormous poetry book Erotica (1779), a 'lyrical cycle' much in the Petrarquist tradition, to the ordering of texts in his poetry collection Amusements and Little Loves and in his 'lyrical cycle' Orpheus' Laments on Eurydice (both in the volume Poems 1783). The author found that both of these sentimentalist poem sequences are more or less derived from rococo Erotica. Amusements are given their sentimentalist turn less by textual modifications than by some important reductions in the overall arrangement of poems. We see a drastic reduction of the collection's size (from 371 poems in 10 books in Erotica to 74 poems in 3 books in Amusements); a reduction of intertextuality and metapoetical autoreferentiality (Sentimentalism prefers not to expose its artistic procedures); and a reduction of the variety of lyrical genres in favour of a clear domination of the idyll. Furthermore, Amusements do no longer constitute a 'lyrical cycle', since the highly complex web of quasi-narrative threads in Erotica has disappeared. Nevertheless, the three books of Amusements show a movement in tonality from slight euphoria to moderate scepticism in eroticis, but also to serious patriotic didacticism whose connection with Sentimentalism will live a long period in Polish literature. Noteworthy in the last part of Amusements are the 'motivic hints' (death motifs) to the directly following Orpheus' Laments. These consist of 24 poems ('laments') and form a fully developed 'lyrical cycle'. They are sentimentalist in their 'simple' quasi- narrative outline, in their pastoral modesty restraining the sublime of the Orpheus-Eurydice theme, and above ail in a most remarkable lyrical 'tonelessness' and 'colourlessness' in expressing the moods of mourning, despair and depression.