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Abstract: The article analyzes a micro detail of D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak’s landscape poetics: the metaphorical epithet Gothic in descriptions of coniferous forests of the Urals, its semantic role, and genesis. The study of the usage of this attribute in the Russian literature of the 19th century based on the resources of the Russian National Corpus corroborates the artistic ingenuity of the writer. In the majority of Corpus examples, the attribute Gothic is predominantly used in its direct meaning, and not metaphorical, as in Mamin-Sibiryak’s work – with architectural, cultural-historical, or stylistic connotations. Separate comparisons of the shape of fir-trees with Gothic architecture are found in the Ural landscapes descriptions by V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko; however, with Mamin-Sibiryak they are not only more frequent, but, crucially, more semantically active as they act as triggers for the description development. The analysis of landscape descriptions in the “Ural Stories” convinces that the epithet Gothic in Mamin-Sibiryak’s work appears (in terms of M. Riffaterre’s poetics) as the key word of a descriptive system, that is, as the semantic centre of a complex of motifs united by the image of a forest thicket as a Gothic temple or city and more or less vividly manifested religious experiences related to it. The use of the epithet Gothic includes the semantic work of the system in the development of landscape description. To define the descriptive system mentioned, the expression forest Gothic is used, which has received a terminological status in the works on the history of the reception of the Gothic in European and American cultures. The prerequisite for the genesis of the descriptive system of forest Gothic in the landscape descriptions by Mamin-Sibiryak is, as shown further in the article, firstly, the writer’s acquaintance with the neo-Gothic architecture of St. Petersburg country estates and, secondly, the assimilation of the idea generally accepted for the cultural community about the kinship of Gothic architecture with coniferous forests. However, since the cultural and intellectual readiness to perceive the forest thicket in the Gothic mode is, although necessary, but still insufficient basis for its implementation as a source of an element of poetics, the article further discusses the question of a possible literary source of influence – the text- translator of forest Gothic. As a possible answer to this question, the article presents the arguments that, for Mamin-Sibiryak, the role of translator of the forest Gothic tradition could have been performed by Fenimore Cooper, popular in Russia, in whose works this descriptive system is presented vividly and widely. The conclusion is formulated about the prospects for the study of peripheral elements of poetics, since here one finds traces of the writer’s artistic imagination capacity which are not always realized in the mainstream of his work, and traces of the resources of his cultural memory, implicitly present in the creative process.

About the author(s) :

Vladimir V. Abashev
Perm State University (Perm, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2712-2759

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 09.02.2023; date of publication: 30.03.2023

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