Alexander Sumarokov Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ronald Vroon

Critical Essay by Ronald Vroon

SOURCE: Vroon, Ronald. “Aleksandr Sumarokov's Elegii liubovnye and the Development of a Verse Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Toward a History of the Russian Lyric Sequence.” Slavic Review 59, no. 3 (2000): 521-46.

In the essay which follows, Vroon argues that the love poems in Elegii liubovnyia, were intended as a narrative sequence, and maintains that the Russian lyric sequence has its beginnings some decades earlier than has been assumed by most critics.

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age.¹ More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier.² This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism...
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