Монолог Крокодила К. И. Чуковского: к проблеме источников и перекличек

Детские чтения. 2020. Т. 18. № 2. С. 257–275.

Степанов А. Г.

This article analyses the sources of Crocodile’s monologue from the taleby K. I. Chukovsky and its parallels in the Russian poetic texts, predomi-nantly of the 19th century. The monologue written in iambic tetrameterwith masculine’s pair rhymes, stands out from the polymetric compositionof the poem in its length, “civic” sound, citations, parody. It evokes as-sociations with a number of texts of metrical, lexical, motivic, and plotcommonality. All of them go back to the “Prisoner of Chillon” by G. Byrontranslated by V. A. Zhukovsky, and from among the original Russian worksit is “Mtsyri” by M. Yu. Lermontov. In Chukovsky’s fairy tale, the origi-nal structural-semantic complex is parodically reinterpreted. Creating the“younger”, “children’s” branch of the revolutionary epic (B. M. Gasparovand I. A. Paperno), the author primarily resorted to the heritage of Rus-sian classical poetry. By adapting it to the child’s perception, he also lefta semantic gap in the story that is accessible to the sophisticated reader.Crocodile’s monologue, which contains the motives of freedom, imprison-ment, confession, suffering, and oppression, prepared the young reader forthe perception of romantic and democratic poetry that awaited him at a newstage of literary development (“works for youth”).

Keywords: поэзия для детей и взрослых, русское стиховедение, ритмические переклички, поэтическая семантика