Osokin Mikhail Yurievich – Candidate in Philology, independent scholar, Sattahip (Thailand)
The article proposes a way out of the textual deadlock that ensnared commentators in the epigrammatic dispute between Trediakovsky and Lomonosov “Bezstydnyi Rodomont…” (“Shameless Rodomont…”) vs “Otmshchat' zavistniku…” (“To Avenge the Envious…”). Literary historians found it so perplexing how to fit these texts into the polemics of the 1750 s that they attempted to attribute the response epigram to someone other than Trediakovsky. The article demonstrates that such attribution has no basis whatsoever. “Rodomont,” cleansed of the scribe’s distortions, eliminates the error in attribution of “Raznyya stikhodeystvii”. The epigram contains Trediakovsky᾽s unique tropes, such as the “dewy honey,” his regular use of the word “debt” in a predicative function, the reference to Aesop’s fable, translated by him in 1752, an “archaic” appeal to boastful outsiders from French farces, most likely to the first farce of Tabarin about Captain Rodomonte, and the “anti-alcohol” tactic of the “stinging bee,” taken from Boileau. The epigram about Rodomont (1753) marks Trediakovsky᾽s first polemical text against Lomonosov, where the “antialcohol” argument is employed, a strategy that would become actively used in the dispute over “The Hymn to the Beard” in 1757. It reveals a shared destructive-polemic tactic with another poetic objection by Trediakovsky to the epigram “Iskusnye pevtsy…” (“Skillful Singers…”), which challenged his theory of flexions – body-shaming opponents and counterposing his own “works” to them. Simultaneously with “Iskusnye pevtsy” in 1753, Lomonosov wrote the epigram “Otmshchat' zavistniku…” (“To Avenge the Envious…”) in response to I.P. Elagin᾽s epistle “K Sumarokovu”. In this text, presented as a gift to Shuvalov on November 12, on his name day, the addressee (Elagin) was portrayed as an “envy” and a “nonentity” without other distinguishing features, and Trediakovsky took it upon himself.
Trediakovsky; Lomonosov; A. Sumarokov; epigram; destructive polemics; Rodomont; polemical strategies.