From Sentimental Clichés to Preromantic Concepts

Abstract

Sentimental clichés were parodied from the 1790’s on. V. L. Pushkin’s Letter to I. I. Dmitriev (1796) is a good example of a parody of sentimental motifs. Pushkin ridiculed the motifs of the graveyard school of poetry, idyllic landscape scenes, and the sentimentalist’s exaggerated sensibility that led to an almost constant “stream of tears.” He criticized the fashionable trend to succeed in poetry with “a tearful lyre.” The central sentimental motif which was widely used in the practice of evoking tears was identified as loneliness, resulting from the death of a beloved friend or mistress. Pushkin jokingly applied all the well-worn epithets in descriptions of this kind,—the pale moon, the gray and mossy gravestone under the oak tree, the despondent cry of the owl, the howling wind… In contrast to the graveyard scene, he spoke also of the tears elicited by the sentimental motif of playful love, expressing itself in different cliché-like phrases such as the doves that fly to bring a message to the beloved one, the swallows that rise exuberantly into the air, and the soft rhyming of exquisite verses. Pushkin’s parody was printed in Karamzin’s almanac Aonides (1796)!¹ V. Pushkin leaned towards neoclassicism which makes his critical attitude understandable. Yet he was not the only critic. Even N. M. Karamzin himself, the acknowledged leader of sentimentalism, complained of hypocritical tearfulness in the foreword of Aonides (book II, 1797).