Ballads by I. I. Dmitriev: genre strategies and tactics

Using the comparative historical and retrospective methods the authors of the article investigate six poetic texts written between 1790 and 1805 by I. I. Dmitriev. All these works display the traits of the ballad and can be considered the ultimate texts for the Russian ballad genre at the preromantic stage of its development. The purpose of the article is to define the general concept of the ballad genre, in a way that it could be perceived by Dmitriev, and to reveal specific ways of its implementation. One of these ways was the creation of a “hybrid”, for example, of a narrative poem and a ballad. Dmitriev’s poem “Ermak” is one of such “hybrids”, with some characteristics of the ode as well. In three Dmitriev’s “true-story ballads” it is possible to see the signs of the parable, the melodrama, and the novella. The “novelistic true story” based on social material without addressing the “miraculous” or the fantastic attracted Dmitriev’s particular interest. Gradual shift from the attributes of other genres resulted in the birth of the unique Russian ballad based on national (both historical and modern) material, with Dmitriev’s “Ancient love” (1805) being one of the examples of such “genuine” ballad. Surprisingly, Dmitriev very quickly realized that the evolving ballad genre had rich potential for parody (“Retired sergeant”). In all his ballads, Dmitriev consistently used the suggestive technique, in particular suspense - the creation of an anxious, tense atmosphere or fear with the help of both verbal and extralinguistic means. All Dmitriev’s balla doi ds are connected by the subject of death, the interest in which became a cultural phenomenon of the era of sentimentalism and preromanticism. The signs of the early Russian ballad and ballad “techniques” established in the article will allow to include into the “ballad context” of the turn of the XIX century more works than is now accepted by scholars.