Vladimir Soloviev as a Literary Critic

sian literary criticism travelled a full circle. The criticism of Pushkin and his friends, frequently of an aphoristic, fragmentary character and sometimes expressed in epistolary form, was above all aesthetically oriented. Questions of style and structure, nuances of expression, niceties of grammar, tone and cadence, and the specific weight of words with regard to their function and position in sentence, verse or stanza are discussed, often quite meticulously. This criticism was influenced, on the one hand, by classicist aesthetics that still dominated literary taste; on the other hand, by the versificatory achievements of Russian poetry since Derzhavin and Karamzin. Highly instructive examples of this approach can be found in Eugene Boratynsky's analysis of A. Muraviev's epic poem Tavrida, and his article Antikritika, in which he defends the aesthetic autonomy of the literary work of art against the assault of a moralistically biased critic.' Symbolist poetics, to some extent

Art · Literature · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies