“DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT AND NEW POETRY” BY N. F. OSTOLOPOV AND THE RUSSIAN RHETORICAL TRADITION

Dictionary of ancient and new poetry by N. F. Ostolopov is the fi rst in Russia dictionary of the theoretical and historical-literary type, unique for the 19th century, it became the forerunner of the encyclopedic and terminological publications of the 20th century. The article contains an interpretation of the rhetorical section of the Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Poetry, created by Nikolai Fedorovich Ostolopov.
N. F. Ostolopov worked on the dictionary from 1806 to 1821 on the instruction of the St. Petersburg “Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences and Arts”. Three volumes of N. F. Ostolopov’s dictionary include more than one and a half thousand pages with interpretations of 424 terms. Among the main sources of the dictionary is the French Encyclopedia. The examples given in the vocabularies sometimes take up several pages, if it is dictated by the purpose of illustrating the thematic and stylistic features of the genre.
Terms from the fi eld of eloquence demonstrate N. F. Ostolopov’s commitment to the rhetorical theory of M. V. Lomonosov — his “Short Guide to Eloquence” (1747). However, N. F. Ostolopov creatively reworks the achievements of his predecessors and off ers his own typology of tropes and fi gures of speech. When classifying rhetorical devices, Ostolopov was guided by the already quite rich rhetorical tradition, choosing, probably, the most authoritative classifi cation of M. V. Lomonosov, but at the same time, the author of the dictionary introduced some changes to the reference typology which illustrate his dispute in absentia with Lomonosov.
The materials of the Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Poetry compiled by Nikolai Ostolopov are an important evidence and result of the literary, rhetorical and linguistic disputes of the Pushkin era.