Изнанка народной войны по версии Николая Некрасова: стихотворение "Так, служба! сам ты в той войне…" в дискурсах о 1812 годе

Studi Slavistici. 2025. Т. 22. № 1. С. 5–28.

Федотов А. С., Uspensky P.

The article analyzes the Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “Yes, Soldier! You in That War…” (“Tak, sluzhba! sam ti v toy voyne…”) (published in 1856), dedicated to the war of 1812. Since in the poem the peasant tells the story of the terrible murder of a captive French family, in which he took part, the main theme of the text is the theme of excessive peasant’s violence during the people’s war. We compare Nekrasov’s poem against numerous discourses about the 1812 campaign — memoirs of the participants, Mikhail Zagoskin’s novel Roslavlev, the official history of the Napoleonic invasion — and show that, against the backdrop of the prevailing ways of describing the war of 1812, the poem “Yes, Soldier! You in That War…” (“Tak, sluzhba! sam ti v toy voyne…”) reviews and problematizes ideas about the Russian people’s nature. The article also analyzes in detail the problem of dating and sources of Nekrasov’s text, as well as the author’s negative attitude towards his poem.

Keywords: русский народ, Zagoskin, Михаил Загоскин, поэтика, нация, poetics, Крымская война, Nikolay Nekrasov, Николай Некрасов, people's war, народная война, the Crimean war, крестьяне в литературе, war and literature, война и литература, литература и идеология, literature and ideology, Русская литература 19 века, Nation, military memoirs, военные мемуары, 19th Century Russian Literature, Peasants in Russian Literature, Великая Отечественная война 1812 года, the War of 1812

Publication based on the results of: Russian Literature in the Social Dimension: SOCIOLIT – An Analytic Computation Platform (2023)