What is the significance of the poetic riddle in eighteenth-century Russia? The first Russian poetic riddle appeared in 1755. In this study, the evolution of the Russian riddling tradition is examined in the literary and cultural contexts of the late 17th-early 19th centuries. Characterized by the complex interactions of oral folklore, Russian-Orthodox book-learning culture, the Greco-Latin rhetorical tradition, and the blending of the Baroque and neo-classical trends, the riddle genre in 18th century Russia offers an opportunity to investigate the process of Russia’s westernization using the notion of cultural marginality. In Chapter 1, I investigate a binary opposition between folk and literary riddles. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a more detailed analysis of the folk and literary aspects of the Russian poetic riddle, as well as its cultural contexts. In Chapter 4, I describe the formation of the cultural paradigm of the poetic riddle in 18th century Russia. This chapter offers an overview of the theoretical attitudes toward the riddle genre in 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th century. This dissertation also contains a corpus of poetic riddles published in Russia between 1755 and 1799. It includes texts and notes: an answer to the riddle, the author, the publication source, the year of publication, and miscellany. The corpus offers a unique opportunity to overview the rich cultural heritage of the Russian poetic riddling tradition of the eighteenth century. It is the nature of the mechanisms of cultural memory that differentiates the experience of Russian eighteenth-century readers from the Western European contemporaries. The concept of poetic play (поэтическая игрушка) is a modern cultural construct in 18th century Russia. The modernity of eighteenth-century Russian literature is characterized, among other attributes, by the origin of new literary genres.
Starikov, Konstantin,
"THE POETIC RIDDLE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA"
(2016).
Slavic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0PC30TZ
