Monologue of K. I. Chukovsky’s Crocodile: towards the problem of sources and parallels

Abstract

The author analyses the sources of Crocodile’s monologue from the tale by K. I. Chukovsky and its parallels in the Russian poetic texts, predominantly of those from the 19th century. The monologue written in iambic tetrameter with masculine pair rhymes, stands out from the polymetric composition of the poem in its length, “civic” sound, citations, and parody. It evokes associations with a number of texts of metrical, lexical, motivic, and plot commonality. All of them can be traced back to the “Prisoner of Chillon” by G. Byron, translated by V. A. Zhukovsky, and original Russian work, “Mtsyri” by M. Yu. Lermontov. In Chukovsky’s fairy tale, the original structural-semantic complex is parodically reinterpreted; creating the “younger”, “children’s” branch of the revolutionary epic (B. M. Gasparov and I. A. Paperno), the author primarily resorted to the heritage of Russian classical poetry. By adapting it to the child’s perception, he also left a semantic gap in the story that is accessible to the sophisticated reader. Crocodile’s monologue, which contains the motives of freedom, imprisonment, confession, suffering, and oppression, prepared the young reader for the perception of romantic and democratic poetry that awaited him/her at a new stage of the literary development (“works for youth”).

Keywords: Prosody, masculine rhyme, semantics, rhythmic parallels, K. I. Chukovsky, Russian poetry for children