SOURCE: Löve, Katharina Hansen. “The Structure of Space in Lermontov's ‘Mcyri.’” Russian Literature 34, no. 1 (July 1993): 37-58.

In the following essay, Löve characterizes Lermontov's poem “Mcyri” as a work that negotiates the difference between the familiar and the unknown in spatial, cultural, and personal terms.

1. Introduction

1.1.

In this article I will examine the peculiarities of the structure of space in a literary text from Russian Romanticism. In Russian literary history this movement is generally situated between 1815 and 1840, so that roughly speaking Romanticism occupies the first half of the nineteenth century, embracing initially Sentimentalism, from which it evolved, and coexisting for some time with Realism in the ultimate years.

From a diachronic point of view, Romanticism is a so-called ‘secondary style’ period. The term originated with Lichačev (1973: 172 ff.), who views the literary evolution as a sequence of, in turn, ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ styles. In this more or...