The road to the academic History of Russian literature: reflections on M. N. Virolainen’s works on the poetry of the Golden Age and romanticism

The article offers the reflections on M. N. Virolainen’s Russian Romanticism as a Problem and On the Genres of the Golden Age Lyrical Poetry, that offer a new perspective on the poetry of the Pushkin era, and touches upon a number of points put forward therein. The central issue under discussion is the attribution of poetological thinking of the first third of the 19^th century to the genre thinking that informs the epoch of Classicism. Even though some of the arguments put forward by M. N. Virolainen in favor of this seem valid, she considers the use by the poets of the Golden Age of elements of the Classical genres in the new contexts while preserving the memory of their origin to be a property of new poetry, rather than Classicism, and, accordingly, the underlying thinking is not a genre one, but new.