A Cross-Cultural Study of Rural and Urban Landscapes in Russian and British Poetry of the Romantic Age

In this paper we mean to highlight the different depictions of rural and urban landscapes in the Romantic Age from a linguistic perspective in, respectively, Great Britain and Russia. The methodological approach of our analysis will consider Sapir’s (2007) cross-cultural theories on the relationships between languages and cultures and, more in particular, Bakhtin’s (1979) theories of stylization as, generally speaking, they lend themselves to interlinguistic and intertextual comparison between the two areas. Firstly, we will look at Wordsworth’s and Clare’s idyllic depictions of the British countryside in ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (1807) and ‘The Harvest Morning’ (1820). We then examine some Russian lines from Pushkin’s ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ (‘The Bronze Horseman’) of 1833, a narrative poem recounting the flooding in Saint Petersburg in 1824. In particular, we will dwell on the lexis referring to the description of the Russian urban landscape and on the semantic value of nature as a destructive force. The methodological approach of this part of the work will employ Propp’s (2003) theories about the supernatural elements of nature and their effects on man. The paper, therefore, will underscore the contrasting aspects of rural and urban landscapes in the British and the Russian contexts by carrying out a contrastive linguistic analysis.