Lecture
Sentimentalism — a mindset in Western European and Russian culture, and the corresponding literary movement. Works written in this genre are based on the reader's feelings. In Europe it existed from the 1720s to the 1780s; in Russia, from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. Sentimentalism proclaimed feeling, not reason, as the dominant of «human nature», which distinguished it from Classicism. Without breaking with the Enlightenment, Sentimentalism remained faithful to the ideal of the normative personality, but held that the condition for its realization was not the «rational» reordering of the world but the liberation and cultivation of «natural» feelings. The hero of Enlightenment literature is more individualized in Sentimentalism; his inner world is enriched by the capacity for empathy, for responding sensitively to what happens around him. By origin (or by conviction) the sentimentalist hero is a democrat; the rich spiritual world of the common person is one of the principal discoveries and achievements of Sentimentalism.
The most outstanding representatives of Sentimentalism are James Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, Laurence Sterne (England), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (France), and Nikolai Karamzin (Russia).
Sentimentalism in Russian literature. Sentimentalism entered Russia in the 1780s and early 1790s thanks to translations of Goethe's Werther, Richardson's Pamela, Clarissa, and Grandison, Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin opened the era of Russian Sentimentalism with his Letters of a Russian Traveler (1791–1792). His tale «Poor Liza» (1792) is a masterpiece of Russian sentimental prose; from Goethe's Werther it inherited a general atmosphere of sensibility and melancholy and the theme of suicide. Karamzin's writings gave rise to a great number of imitations; at the beginning of the nineteenth century there appeared A.E. Izmailov's «Poor Masha» (1801), «A Journey to Southern Russia» (1802), I. Svechinsky's «Henrietta, or the Triumph of Deceit over Weakness or Delusion» (1802), the numerous tales of G.P. Kamenev («The Story of Poor Marya»; «Unfortunate Margarita»; «The Beautiful Tatyana»), and others.
Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev belonged to Karamzin's circle, which advocated the creation of a new poetic language and campaigned against the archaic, high-flown style and genres that had outlived their usefulness.
The early work of Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky bears the mark of Sentimentalism. The 1802 publication of his translation of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard became an event in the artistic life of Russia, for he translated the poem «into the language of Sentimentalism in general; he translated the genre of the elegy, not an individual work of the English poet with its own particular individual style» (E.G. Etkind). In 1809 Zhukovsky wrote the sentimental tale «Maryina Roshcha» in the spirit of N.M. Karamzin.
Russian Sentimentalism had exhausted itself by 1820. It was one of the stages of the broader pan-European literary development that brought the Age of Enlightenment to a close and opened the way to Romanticism.
The main features of the literature of Sentimentalism. Thus, taking into account everything listed above, one can identify several main features of Russian Sentimentalist literature: a departure from the straightforwardness of Classicism, a pronounced subjectivity of approach to the world, a cult of feeling, a cult of nature, a cult of innate moral purity and unspoiledness, and the assertion of the rich spiritual world of representatives of the lower estates. Attention is devoted to a person's inner emotional world, and feelings, rather than great ideas, occupy the foremost place.
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