Graveyard Walk in the First Third of the 19th Century: Healthcare, Memorial Politics, Aesthetics, Literature

Abstract

The undertaken thorough historical and literary analysis of A. S. Pushkin’s poem “When lost in thought I wander beyond the town…” (“Kogda za gorodom zadumchiv ia brozhu…”, 1836) reveals its pretexts and likely sources among which the most important ones are G. G. Byron’s epigram “On Lord Elgin”, the 5th, 8th and 11th letters of A. Pichot’s “Voyage historique et littéraire en Angleterre et en Ecosse” and the 1st part of W. Wordsworth’s «Essay upon Epitaphs». Meanwhile, the article outlines a broader representative spectrum of sociocultural, psychological and aesthetical ideas which determine how the authors of the end of the 18th—the first third of the 19th century deal with funerary and memorial topics. The article shows how medical and healthcare attitudes of the epoch, as well as some ideological shifts, which paved the way for European cemetery reform, filter the choices and the ways of textual representations of traditional literary rhetorics (Horatian topos of beatus ille in particular). On the other hand, the study demonstrates how narrative models conventional for the first third of 19th century function as the universal language suitable for describing utterly different graveyard spaces. The important research subject is the authors’ critical attitude to the official state commemorative politics, which involved a major change in aesthetic trends of the epoch. Development of associanist perception and sentience theory constitutes new demands for funerary and commemorative material culture and, in the case of Pushkin’s poem, stimulates the rethinking and transformation of well-established elegiac figurative and narrative patterns.