The hymn “For the driving away” or “The apocalypse to offer” (about late G. R. Derzhavin's poetics)

The article is dedicated to one of Derzhavin’s later works, “A Lyrical and Epic Hymn about Forcing the French away from Our Motherland in 1812”. The author himself considered this gigantic (646 lines!) poetic essay, where Napoleon’s intervention was associated with the arrival of the Antichrist, to be essential in the context of his works. However, the younger poetic generation saw it as the sign of his “senile imbecility” crowned by his creative glory. Hymn’s structure was indeed original: Derzhavin metaphorically retold the revelation of St. John in verse and corrected it just the same time in 51 prosaic comments where he referred to the current events taken from the media and anecdotes. All that, as a whole, created a particular unity that had a certain impact on the reader. Derzhavin conducted a sort of experiment of elaborating essential literary instruments such as: poetics of improving an “exalted” lyrical statement by means of the remarks in a “business style”; poetics of excitement through the poetical understanding of an event; poetics of correlation of an “up-to-the-minute” author’s text with the Eternal text of Gospel. Later, these literary instruments became popular and were used in Silver age of Russian poetry.