Aleksandrova I. Russian Comedy of the First Quarter of the 19th Century: Traditions, Stylistic Modifications, Genre Canon

The thesis is a complex investigation of the main tendencies on idea and poetics levels in the development of the Russian comedy of 1800s - 1830s. The comedies by I. A. Krylov, A. S. Griboedov, A.A. Shakhovskoy, M.N. Zagoskin, N.I. Khmelnitsky, A.I. Pisarev, P.A. Katenin, F.F. Kokoshkin and their contemporaries are the focus of analysis. It is proved that the development of this genre in Russian literature of the 18th - and 19th-century is the immanent process, in which comedies of 1800s - 1830s provide the continuity of national genre tradition. The essential feature of the early 19th century comedy is, on the one hand, certain eclecticism of its poetics which reflects the transitional nature of the epoch and, on the other hand, the marked intensification of genre-type synthesis resulting in the emergence of diverse genre modifications of comedy. It was the dialectics of these tendencies that defined the specificity of comedy of the first quarter of the 19th century.