I. I. Dmitriev i osvoenie russkogo prostranstva.

This article begins with the proposition that I. I. Dmitriev’s influence on a younger generation of poets (including Žukovskij, Batjuškov, and Puškin) derives in large measure from the strong link that these contemporaries perceived between Dmitriev’s work and Russian geography. As his Memoirs attest, Dmitriev had felt since childhood that travel ought to engender artistic inspiration, but he was never to journey abroad and domestic territories were not yet sufficiently aestheticized to serve as an explicit source of artistic production. When he later returned to the Volga region of his childhood as an experienced traveler and established writer, however, Dmitriev was able to resolve the problem himself: in that specific biographical context, travel along the Volga was to unleash new poetic energies, allowing Dmitriev to create verses that articulated an unprecedented appreciation of the Russian countryside and became artistic models for subsequent poets.