Cultural and Poetic Codes of Pushkin’s Texts in Lev Stepanov’s “Aesthetic Outlook”

The aim of the study is to analyze the research method of Lev Stepanov (1938–2014) in the context of Russian Pushkin studies of the 1980s–2010s, as well as to study his unfinished plans as a cultural synthesis that combines the unity of style, methods of interpretation, and the connection of the scientific heritage with the personality of the scientist. The material is Stepanov’s articles and unpublished manuscripts, supplemented by the works of Roman Jakobson, Aleksandr Zholkovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and other researchers of Pushkin’s poetics. The methodology includes a systemic-typological and structural-semiotic approach that allows us to identify poetological categories in the scientist’s works, as well as a hermeneutic analysis to reconstruct his “aesthetic outlook,” which combines philosophical aesthetics, intertextual connections, and textual accuracy. The poetic ontology reveals the specificity of the Russian mentality, national cultural codes in the artistic thinking of A. S. Pushkin. The comprehension of the psychology of creativity, the individual-figurative vision of the world of the poet is motivated by Stepanov as the need to follow Pushkin’s own stylistic and constructive narrative principles. According to the scientist’s concept, Pushkin should be “revived” not by the methods of simplified popularization, biographical grotesque, but based on the philosophical and aesthetic context of the era and text analytics. The author of the article shows how the views of Lev Stepanov are correlated with the literary-critical context of his time, are in a state of unanimity, discussion or correlation in relation to the judgments of other leading Pushkin scholars. His method, comparable with Zholkovsky’s generative poetics and Jakobson’s “poetry of grammar”, demonstrates how trust in the intuition and empiricism of the text reveals worldview attitudes that are congenial to Pushkin’s work. It is emphasized that these words can rightfully be addressed to the scientist himself. Stepanov analyzes the formulas of the poet’s thoughts, his thought-images, given not as a solution or statement, but as a generation of thought, a process, a guess and an insight that is still subject to further thought and experience. A similar process of generating a thought following the author’s is experienced by the researcher himself. It is stated that the scientific novelty of the scientist’s research is associated with an interest in the poet’s myth-making, conditioned by the significance of scientific ideas and the scale of Stepanov’s personality as a philologist. The question of actualizing interest in Kuban literary criticism and its systematic study is raised.