Greek anthology in the journal Sovremennik (1836-1866)

The article studies the reception of Greek lyric poetry in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), which followed Pushkin’s tradition. The author focuses on the critical article by V. S. Pecherin “On the Greek Epigram”, which reviews the Greek anthology from antiquity to its modern translations into European and Russian languages, on the poems by E. A. Baratynsky, Ya. Grot and D. I. Koptev, combined by the editor P. A. Pletnev into anthological cycles, and on the anonymous review of the Greek Poems by N. Shcherbina. It is concluded that critical texts on anthological poetry address its genre and thematic aspects. Pecherin writes about the anthological epigram as a genre and gives examples of philological translations. The anonymous author of the review of Shcherbina’s collection of poems considers his imitations of the Greek anthology and discusses the thematic unity of the texts. The poetic variations by Baratynsky and Koptev from anthological collections, while formally limited to iambic verses and elegiac distich, are characterized by mixing genres and themes as a distinctive feature of the reform of lyrical genres.