ZHUKOVSKY THE INNOVATOR AND PUSHKIN THE ARCHAIST (two studies from the history of the language of Russian poetry)

The article considers the works of poets from the 18th and early 19th century in terms of the variability of two points in the grammatical system of the Russian language: (1) the formation of adverbial participles from prefixed verbs ending in -йти (the patternвошед, пришед versus войдя, придя) and (2) the choice of the genitive plural of the nounвремя with a stressed or unstressed vowel (времян, времен with ['э] versus or времён). The forms ending in -йдя entered the Russian poetry in the late 1780s thanks to Karamzin and the poets of his circle, primarily Dmitriev. In the first decades of the 19th century, these forms were already quite common: in particular, they are found in the later works of Derzhavin and Khvostov, as well as in Zhukovsky’s poetry of the «Arzamas» period (1813–1818). Against this background, the complete absence of such forms in Pushkin's poetry appears surprising. A comparison with Pushkin's prose, in which forms ending in -шед are also absolutely dominant, allows us to conclude that we are not dealing with a case of conscious archaization, but rather one of a real usage. As for the genitive case of the word время, until the beginning of the 1830s, the base form was времен. The initially competing form времян was perceived as clearly outdated (or even simply as “wrong”) as early as the 1820s; when he used this form in “Eugene Onegin”, Pushkin raised objections from critics who did not understand his notion of parody. In the 1830s, the formвремён appears in the verses of A. I. Polezhaev and V. I. Sokolovsky, and it spread very quickly. The earliest known example of the use of the form времён, however, is found in the works of V.A. Zhukovsky (the poem «Peri and the Angel», 1821); in Pushkin’s poems, this form is absent. Thus, according to both parameters considered here, Zhukovsky’s language is closer to the modern standard than Pushkin’s. These examples show that the idea of Pushkin as an innovator in the Russian language, while true on the whole, nonetehless requires clarification in many details.