Historical Truth in Poetry: Napoleon in the Verses of Voloshin, Tyutchev, and Pushkin
This article examines the degree to which one can illustrate in poetry a historical phenomenon vested in an artistic form. Here the author looks into the verses of Voloshin, Tyutchev, and Pushkin: “Bonaparte”, “Napoleon”, and “Hero”. These verses bring to light Napoleon’s personality and the histori...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | Russian |
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Academic Publishing House Researcher
2014-12-01
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| Series: | Evropejskij Issledovatelʹ |
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| Online Access: | http://www.erjournal.ru/journals_n/1419791571.pdf |
| Summary: | This article examines the degree to which one can illustrate in poetry a historical phenomenon vested in an artistic form. Here the author looks into the verses of Voloshin, Tyutchev, and Pushkin: “Bonaparte”, “Napoleon”, and “Hero”. These verses bring to light Napoleon’s personality and the historical environment in which he had been working. In each of the verses, Napoleon is portrayed as a carrier of immense romantic energy, thanks to which he leaves such an ineffaceable, meteoric trace in history, and is depicted as steeped in some kind of romantic enchantment. At the same time, each of the verses brings to light the various aspects of the Napoleonic era and his deeds. Voloshin draws a colorful picture of the Great French Revolution and social-political upheavals inherent in it, within the depths of which, under the canopy of Providence, there is born a new phenomenon that is set to become in the near future an embodiment and carrier of the will of world history. Tyutchev portrays Napoleon as already quite a full-fledged phenomenon of history, a child of the revolution, which engages in a desperate and, at the same time, hopeless struggle with his “mother”, a struggle in which the hero is doomed to a tragic end. Whereas Pushkin in his verse, in the form of epic truth typical of him, presents a retrospection of the entire Napoleonic era and the whole amplitude of the activity of this phenomenal personality. And what is depicted as most remarkable, in terms of eternalizing him, is a fact that sort of stands out among a multitude of great deeds: Napoleon’s handshake with a plague-stricken man at a hospital in Egypt intended to elevate his fighting spirit. It may seem that greatness is shown here as a “non-heroic” deed, which, in turn, is a demonstration of the use of an ingenious medium by a great artist to portray greatness in what may seem as something little noticed, which is what is eternal. |
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| ISSN: | 2219-8229 2224-0136 |