Project Goals

Com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture and com­par­a­tive poet­ics have accu­mu­lated, over more than a cen­tury his­tory of their exis­tence, a vast amount of facts that char­ac­ter­ize the rela­tion­ship between national poetic lan­guages, the devel­op­ment of cross-cul­tural trends in world lit­er­a­ture, numer­ous influ­ences of var­i­ous lit­er­a­tures on other lit­er­a­tures, rela­tion­ships between par­tic­u­lar authors, the place that par­tic­u­lar lit­er­ary works obtain in other lit­er­a­tures, etc. Researchers have iden­ti­fied numer­ous cases of spe­cific poetic textsʼ depen­dence on poetic works writ­ten in other lan­guages. In par­tic­u­lar, con­sid­er­able suc­cess has been achieved by schol­ars study­ing the role of bor­rowed lin­guo-poetic forms in the devel­op­ment of Russ­ian poetic lan­guage. At the same time, a great many schol­arly issues remain unex­plored, and the results of the work already con­ducted are scat­tered and dis­persed over var­i­ous sources and often remain known to domain spe­cial­ists only. These cir­cum­stances hin­der fur­ther accu­mu­la­tion of human­i­tar­ian knowl­edge, ham­per the progress in the aca­d­e­mic field in ques­tion and pre­vent com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture from tak­ing advan­tage of mod­ern data-han­dling tech­niques and hence from a bet­ter con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of its own tasks.

This pro­ject envis­ages the fol­low­ing two lines of research:

1. orga­niz­ing large-scale research work in order to fill numer­ous gaps in schol­arly views on the func­tion­ing and inter­ac­tion of poetic lan­guage in dif­fer­ent lan­guages;
2. con­duct­ing inno­v­a­tive work on the selec­tion, pro­cess­ing, sys­tem­ati­za­tion, as well as dig­i­ti­za­tion and data­base stor­age of avail­able knowl­edge in com­par­a­tive poet­ics and com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture.

Both lines of research will deal with the his­tory of the Russ­ian adap­ta­tion of Romance (pri­mar­ily French, Ital­ian, Span­ish and Por­tuguese) lin­guo-poetic forms which have had a fun­da­men­tal effect on the for­ma­tion of Russ­ian poetic lan­guage and Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture in gen­eral (the only com­pa­ra­ble influ­ences being those of Church Slavonic lit­er­ary cul­ture and of Clas­si­cal antiq­uity).

Suc­cess­ful work within these two lines of research will not only yield impor­tant aca­d­e­mic and prac­ti­cal results, but will also break new ground for com­par­a­tive research. Among other things, in the future, our infor­ma­tion sys­tem and the mech­a­nisms involved in it may aid the cre­ation of a new dis­ci­pline: transna­tional his­tory of poetic lan­guages.