Educational Periodicals in the “Court Pedagogy” of Mikhail Muravyov and Vasily Zhukovsky. Article One

Abstract

In 1829–1831, Vasily Zhukovsky, a mentor to the heir to the throne, published two pedagogical journals Sobiratel’ [The Collector] (1829) and Muraveynik [The Ant Hill] (1831). Zhukovsky’s publishing project was greatly influenced by the traditions of court pedagogy associated with the name of Mikhail Muravyov, who taught Russian literature, Russian history and moral philosophy to Grand Dukes Alexander and Konstantin Pavlovich for many years. Muravyov wrote many prose works of an artistic and didactic nature, which were printed in a small number of copies in the Imperial printing house. One of all these publications is important: “Obitatel’ Predmestya, Periodicheskiye Listy” [The Inhabitant of the Suburbs, Periodical Sheets] (1790); it was published weekly and is the closest analogue to the court pedagogical journals of Zhukovsky. The publication is part of a prose cycle—a trilogy which also includes “Bernovskie Pis’ma” [Bernovo Letters] and “Emilievy Pis’ma” [Emil’s Letters], that Muravyov used in pedagogical practice. Muravyov tried to create a kind of a friendly community with his students, a small circle in which the sentimentalist model of communication of souls was to be realised. His prose was intended to contribute to the formation of this group space and therefore was saturated with the circle semantics. The latter particularly manifested itself in the correlation of the image of the main child character of the trilogy, Vasinka, with the personality of one of Muravyov’s students— Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich. Vasinka in “Emilievy Pis’ma” is an improved version of Konstantin. Vasinka has the same advantages as Konstantin and successfully fights with his shortcomings. However, the message of the trilogy is not so straightforward as to be limited by the boundaries of the circle. On the contrary, it tends to maximise universality, creating a kind of an encyclopedia of the universe, which includes people, nature, and works of art. There is no room only for urban civilisation. The diversity of the world in the trilogy is brought to the common denominator of the village idyll. Therefore, the plot of Muravyov’s narrative is weakened, because the idyll is essentially eventless. This is not a chain of events, but a series of images. This is what provides not only didactic “visibility”, but also the potential “mediality” of the text, gives the text the ability to be distributed in issues and integrate into life, merge with its chronological and everyday flow. The idyllic pictures of “Emil’s cycle” are brought together by the axiomatic level of the text. It is most clearly articulated in the conversation of the inhabitant of the suburb with Ilanov—a religious and philosophical discourse in which ethics is combined with metaphysics and cosmology. All these features of “Emil’s trilogy” were further continued and developed in Zhukovsky’s pedagogical journals. The following article will be devoted to a detailed analysis of this continuity.