Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolay Nadezhdin: Creative History and Sources of the Poem “The Sail”

Abstract

The article offers a new version of the concept and figurative nature of the well-known poem “The Sail” by Mikhail Lermontov. A set of subject lexemes from two articles written by Nikolay Nadezhdin based on the materials of his dissertation is considered as the source of most of the semantic signs of this text. The articles were simultaneously published in two magazines (Ateney [Athenaeus] and Vestnik Evropy [Herald of Europe]) and contain the conception of the phase development of world poetry. In the articles, Nadezhdin outlines the presence of two - classical and romantic - phases and proved that the latter expressed a crisis state of consciousness and is, in its then contemporary form, a forerunner of the transition to new forms of consciousness and the art of words. The task of these forthcoming new forms was to combine two complementary principles that structurally characterize the classical and romantic phases of poetry - oriented towards the outer and inner worlds, respectively. Nadezhdin is a recently hired professor of the language arts department of Moscow University where Lermontov also transfers. Lermontov publishes his debut poem in the same magazine as Nadezhdin, but chronologically later. Getting acquainted with the professor’s articles and his conception, Lermontov undertakes the mission of a qualitative renewal of poetic art that Nadezhdin declared. The poem “The Sail” embodies this decision of the young poet, that is why he is consistent as an author in extracting Nadezhdin’s figurative signs-concepts from the articles in addition to the initial emblematic line from Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s poem. Thus, the reference to the famous Russian romantic acquires a motivated meaning within the framework of Nadezhdin’s general conception. The conception also explains the stanza-based division of the text into into descriptive and reflexive segments, which are analogs of of orientation towards the outer and the inner world. Lermontov demonstrates that his authorial consciousness overcomes the crisis of the romantic phase. He depicts the romantic character and his dialogue with a different, external subject objectively, in an estranged manner. As a result, the reader understands that the author, as a third consciousness, in his expression and values, is outside the framework of the designated problems of the dispute between the character and the sail, that is, between the real bearer and the actor of new poetry. Associated with this is the special position of this text in Lermontov’s transition from poetry to prose, as well as its inclusion in the famous letter of Lopukhina in September 1832. All this taken together makes it possible to speak about the need to consider the Lermontov / Nadezhdin plot as promising, although absent in Lermontov Encyclopedia.