On the Intricacy of Including Secondary Writers in the Literary Canon (the Case of A. Shakhovskoy)

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Absract: Drawing on the example of the artistic destiny of the playwright Alexander Shakhovskoy (1777–1846), the article considers the issues of the evolution of writer's reputation, as well as the ways and means of canonizing secondary writers, as well as the differences between the readers' memory and the historical / literary canon. An outstanding figure in the Russian theater of the 1800s and early 1820s, a popular playwright, an active participant in the debates between the “Archaists“and the “Innovators”, Shakhovskoy eventually lost his leading position in theater and literature. The article accounts for these changes by pointing out several facts: Shakhovskoy stayed true to the principles of the “Archaists”, outdated by the mid-1820s; however, he kept influencing the Russian comediography — the fact well illustrated by the appearance of such a notorious play as Griboyedov's “Woe from Wit”. Pushkin made the name of Shakhovskoy-the-playwright canonical in “Eugene Onegin”, and so it remained in readers’ reception. Fragments from the works of Shakhovskoy, well into the mid-1860s, were included in school anthologies, but later his texts were taken out of this corpus, even though it is unnatural for the Russian historical-and-literary canon to be lacking in that way.   
Keywords: secondary writers, canonization, Shakhovskoy, reader’s canon, historical-literary canon, evolution of a writer’s reputation
Category: Vol 78, NO 1 (2019)
DOI: 10.31857/S241377150003919-3
Pages: 27-33
Author: Ljubov Kiseleva
Information about the author: Professor of Russian Literature. Affiliation: University of Tartu Address: Estonia

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