2016 Vol. 7 №3

The article discusses some exercises of N. M. Karamzin, the first great Russian writer who worked in the prosaic miniature`s form, a short text which we compare to a poetic one. In the Russian tradition the prosaic miniature developed primarily in journals and magazines. Translations, sometimes fragmentary, from European languages, of both poetic and prosaic texts became one of the main sources of the Russian prosaic miniature. Karamzin started with some translated miniature texts and went on to compose his original poetic texts in the first half of the 1790s. Analogues of his poetry can be found in Karamzin’s longer prosaic works;. Later publishers extend the collection of Karamzin’s prosaic miniature texts through fragmenting his other works.

The article examines various means of expressing the author’s modality which is explicit about the author’s intentions and evaluations in “Poor Liza” by N. Karamzin. The question of relations between the “narrator” and the “author” is in the focus. The analysis og the story shows that the category of the author’s modality gets implemented with the language means of various levels, i. e. evaluative adjectives, explicit modal words and word combinations (certain word-combinations with modal verbs and predicatives), particular syntactic structures, etc.

The article proves that the gallant style Précieuses of 1760—1770s had a great stylistic influence on the Russian literature of the XVIII—XIXth centuries. «Natalia, Boyarskaya doch’» («Natalia, Boyar's daughter»), a story by N. M. Karamzin, was created under the decisive influence of «Doushen’ka» («Darling»), a poem by I. F. Bogdanovich, and absorbed the traditions of La Fontaine and Voltaire, becoming a model of the literary style for I. I. Dmitriev that he demonstrated in his fairy tale «Prichudnitsa» (“Dreamer”) and then for most Russian writers of the first half of the XIXth century.

The article examines the structure of Baratynsky’s poem and compares it to a Karamzin’s tale because in spite of some substantial differences these two works prove to be clearly similar. The characters could be more deeply understood if the esearch goes into their inner world. Such analysis allows to discover a few psychological strategies introduced into literary practice by Karamzin: the author’s presence in fictional world, "closeups", "anthropocentric" landscape, specific fictional details, bodily "code". Comparativistic analysis of the two texts, that are storywise close to each other, not only allows to trace Karamzin’s psychological tradition in Baratynsky’s poem "Eda", but gives grounds to make a broader conclusion: with "Poor Liza" the Russian literature started to explore the most subtle emotional moves in human soul showing them as a process, and the tradition founded by Karamzin paved way for the most important psychological discoveries of great Russian writers.