THE RHETORICAL ASPECT OF “EPINIKION” BY FEOFAN PROKOPOVICH

The search for techniques and ways of artistic expression as a style- and genre-forming means of decorating the text was the main concern of baroque writers. This article analyzes the rhetorical devices of poetic texts by Feofan Prokopovich in comparison with recommendations that Feofan gives in his treatises “On the Poetic Art” and “On the Art of Rhetoric”. “Epinikion” demonstrates the early Feofan’s adherence to the Church Slavonic cultural tradition. It contains the widest range of Slavonic literary lexical and grammatical features and rhetorical devices. Feofan’s use of rhetorical devices testifies to his «moderate» baroque aspirations, noted by Aleksandr Mikhailovich Panchenko. “Epinikion” is written in the ode genre. In it, along with metaphor, comparison, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, personification, paraphrase, antonomasia, and hyperbole, Feofan uses sarcasm and caustic irony against enemies, whom he calls «barbarians» and “heretics”. In his syllabic texts, Feofan quite strictly observes the requirements he prescribes in his works on poetic art and rhetoric: the avoidance of pomposity and decorative excesses in texts of the middle style and even a more moderate use of figures of speech in the plain style texts. It is no coincidence that Feofan Prokopovich was probably the first to call for the abolition of the baroque poetic and rhetorical devices in his treatises. With his poetic gift, this stern and strict supporter of Peter the Great’s reforms sought to demonstrate the use of a new style, rhetoric, and poetics in Russian literature. Feofan’s poetic texts differ to a large extent from seventeenth-century verses and paved the way for Russian classicism and the new Russian poets — Antioch Kantemir, Vasily Trediakovsky and Mikhail Lomonosov.