Poetry of the Slavophiles: Tracing Slavophile Philosophy Through 19th-Century Poetics

• Main Author: Thompson, Aaron Michael
• Other Authors: Polowy, Teresa
• Language: en_US
• Published: The University of Arizona. 2015
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/579060

This is the second part of an overview of the cultural history of Slavophiles, a term applicable to those ascribing to the traditional values, especially in relation to the philosophical treatises written by Aleksey Khomyakov, Ivan Kireevsky, and their contemporaries from 1839 to the middle 1860s. Having established the troika of themes at the treatises' foundation—the Russian state and Tsar, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the hierarchical governmental mir and sociocultural obshchina constructions present in history—I examine the philosophical, theological, and anthropological realities of poems by Khomyakov, Nikolai Yazykov, and Fyodor Tyutchev. My primary focus is on Tyutchev, a philosopher-poet and lifetime Slavophile who is known for many works which fall outside of this investigation. I will uncover and discuss how Khomyakov and Kireevsky's ideas are conveyed through the semiotics, rhetoric, and specific poetics of three decades of Tyutchev's oeuvre. In the end, I find that Tyutchev transversed through three phases, beginning with a personal construction of Slavdom or the Slavic obshchina , creating a relationship between Slavic and universally true good, and concluding with the development of the correlation between Western and evil. The final part of the Slavophile overview will the existing sociopolitical remnants of Slavophile ideologies in the 21st century.