A literary debate around Gavrila Derzhavin’s ode ‘The depiction of Felitsa’ as reflected in Vasily Kapnist’s Horatian interpretations

The article discusses how a literary debate around Gavrila Derzhavin’s ode The Depiction of Felitsa is reflected in Vasily Kapnist’s Horatian interpretations. In this debate, Kapnist puts emphasis on important aspects of his poetical philosophy, which was to a large extent shared by Derzhavin, who departed from these views on sincerity, permissible limits of flattery in poetry, etc. in the ode The Depiction of Felitsa, this having provoked the literary debate. The paper shows that repercussions of this debate are also found in the later works of Kapnist - in his three Horatian interpretations dedicated to Derzhavin, namely Lomonosov (1790/91), To the Muse (1797), and Against Gold-Greed (1811-1814). In these works, Kapnist develops the same topics that we can see in the first of his odes related to the debate (A Raphael’s Answer to the Felitsa’s Poet). The paper analyzes the evolution of Kapnist’s views on the essence of the debate: it is shown how various are his attitudes to this issue in different periods of his life. The ode Lomonosov, which uses the Horatian pretext only as a source from which it takes its compositional scheme, appears to be a ‘softened’ version of A Raphael's Answer to the Felitsa’s Poet, devoid of some ‘satirical’ subtext. Lomonosov represents a kind of example to follow that shows Derzhavin how to write odes sincerely and selflessly. In the ode Against Gold-Greed, Kapnist repeats the model of A Raphael's Answer to the Felitsa’s Poet: he starts from correcting exclusively poetic ‘flaws’ of the Derzhavin's ode, seeking a more accurate translation of some passages of the Horace’s ode in his own interpretation, and then he again turns to the theme of excessive flattery of the Derzhavin’s ode.