The poet - the prophet and the citizen: new year's verses of V.G. Benediktov

In the article the poetics and ideological contents of four New Year's (eonic) poems written at the end of the 1850th by V.G. Benediktov is considered. In the second half of the 1830th he drew attention with courageous stylistic experiments, however at the beginning of the 1840th, after critical statements of V.G. Belinsky, lost popularity and was forgotten. During the Crimean war and the eve of Emancipation Benediktov was before the reader in new (and still not studied in literary criticism) shape - the poet-citizen and the author of religious poems. As one of genre forms for expression of civil and religious feelings the form of New Year's verses, at that time already rather archaic for the Russian poetry was chosen by the poet. Considered as the spokesman of "vulgar romanticism", Benediktov appeared in these verses the citizen and the patriot, sincerely, deeply and somehow very personally interested in emancipation of the people and in the movement of the country on the way of progress. Not ostentatious, but alien fanaticism religiousness; educational ideals; monarchism - there are constants of public consciousness of the ordinary Russian writer. In a sense Benediktov acts as "chronicler" of moods of the Russian educated society in a transition period of the 1856 - 1860th, consistently acting on behalf of generalized "we". In the first part of a cycle ("On the New 1857th"), clearly agitational, the poet draws a situation of "thaw" and consistently, to be exact, "superfluous", in a stylistic manner peculiar to him, describes a mythological archetype of fight of Light against Darkness. The second poem ("Hi to Old 1858th"), printed with acceptable distortions, contains a New Year's prayer for "Person" in which image lines of Christ and the emperor Alexander II are integrated. The third part ("For the New 1859th year") represents a New Year's psalm. The choice of this genre with which in the 1700th the Russian eonic poetry began, was dictated, apparently, by problems of spiritual association of "believers" (in Emancipation) and findings of personal internal forces. The philosophical New Year's elegy "On 1861th" concludes a cycle. "Time philosophy" and utopian expectations of the poet was reflected in it. Some kind of "cauda" in "the New Year's metatext" is "the poem on a case" "Great action" in which Benediktov welcomes the Tsar-Emancipator and the people submissively accepting the favor granted to it - freedom.