Reception of antiquity in Russian literature of the first third of the XIX century (the study of the Northern flowers almanac)

In the first third of the XIX century, the role of the periodicals in the development of Russian literature increased. Northern Flowers is one of the most authoritative and long-lived almanacs, edited by Anton Delvig (1825-1831) and Alexander Pushkin (1832). The authors and editors had common views on aesthetics and shared interest in harmonic antiquity, plastic arts, and categories of philosophy and culture. This is the first time the study of antique reminiscences is conducted using the materials of all issues of the Northern Flowers almanac as a single complex of texts. The method of content analysis makes it possible to highlight specific cases of reception and review of the ancient tradition and to identify the most regular reminiscences according to the statistical data. The following issues are considered: the reception of antiquity in critical literature; theoretical questions of translation; publication of translations of ancient authors’ texts; references to and direct citations of ancient authors; reception of ancient genres; and images of plastic art and mythology. The study revealed that the ancient theme was not only a means of stylization and providing aesthetic value for literary texts. The reception of classical art forms served as the basis for the development of ideas of Russian national literature.