NEKRASOV'S TRAGIC SOCIAL LYRICISM.

This paper argues that Nikolai Nekrasov's "V derevne" explores the limits of the Romantic view of lyricism as a socially isolated endeavor and attempts instead to use the lyric form to express social relationships. It contends that the poem works to conceptualize a social whole in which peasant and non-peasant are directly connected. Tragedy emerges as the mode of this connection: the lyric hero of the poem's first monologue and the lamenting peasant in the poem's second part each turn inward to bemoan circumstances which they feel they cannot change, including, in the case of the lyric hero, their own individual moods. This is the essence of Nekrasov's tragic pathos. As a folkloric omen, the poem's central image of gathering crows introduces a supernatural element to the poem which, rather than distinguishing a space separate from socio-economic realities, renders what might otherwise be considered natural an intentional effect. The poem's allusions through the crow omen to supernatural forces points to the actual social forces that structure the poem's world. The mysteriousness of these forces is thematized as a shared alienation, which is experienced even by the peasant in her presumably collective sphere as her mourning becomes a more modern sense of melancholia. Representing a collective experience of shared isolation, the poem attempts to embody the social totality which no single individual can grasp, in this way drawing on tragedy to offer a new form of lyric which does not ignore social divisions but rather expresses them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]