THE POETIC FORMULA “FEMININE TOPONYM IN THE INDIRECT CASE + EPITHET SCHASTLIVOI ‘HAPPY’ IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

The article examines the poetic formula “feminine toponym in the indirect case + epithet schastlivoi ‘happy’ which occupies the position of the end of the verse, based on the data of the poetic subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. More than 45 occurrences were found, variants of the formula were established (constructions with the epithet prekrasnoi ‘beautiful’ and the replacement of the toponym with the word strana ‘country’), a tendency was noted to include unofficial or historical names in the formula (Arcadia, Hesperia, etc.), dating mainly to antiquity. The use of the formula in various iambic sizes is noted as a trend. The formula appeared in 1810 in the “Inscription on the coffin of the shepherdess” by K. Batyushkov (zhila v Arkadii schastlivoi ‘lived in Arkady happy’) and is fixed until the end of the twentieth century. Initially, it pointed to an idyllic space in the present or to a lost ideal attributed to the past (the Golden age). Semantic transformations of the formula are associated with a romantic attempt to represent a rebellious, inharmonious ideal or with contrasting one’s imperfect but expensive space with someone else’s, happy one. The popularity of the formula confi rms its ironic use since 1824 and up to the middle of the twentieth century in poetry and in prose.