Arefev Dmitry Andreevich – PhD student, Junior Researcher of the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Leading Librarian of the Interdisciplinary Research Center of the M.I. Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature; ORCID: 0000-0002-1346-2939
This article attempts to delineate the reading repertoire of Giacomo Leopardi, the foremost Italian lyric poet of the nineteenth century, and to focus closely on his reception of (pre-)Romantic literature. While classical antiquity and Italian poetry, represented, among others, by figures such as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, and Dante, play a pivotal role in the poet’s creative formation, it is known that he also had access to the contemporary literature available in his family library. This collection included such works as Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie and an Italian translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. The article demonstrates the specific nature of the Italian poet’s reception of these two novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and traces elements of their influence on his own poetic output, as exemplified in the poems Ultimo canto di Saffo, La sera del dì di festa, and Le ricordanze. The author concludes that, partly due to these influences, Leopardi developed the literary principles that would underlie many of his poems, namely, the autobiographical mode, a turn to ancient times and childhood as evidence of the natural human state and the expression of intimate feelings through the topos of transmusicality and motif of memory.
G. Leopardi; Zibaldone; G. de Staël; Corinne ou l’Italie; J.W. von Goethe; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers