Methods of representing the image of Peter I in the prose of K.P. Masalsky and P. K. Furman

The subject of this study is the key features of the artistic representation of Tsar Peter in Russian historical fiction, using K. P. Masalsky's "Byl’ 1703 goda" (1842) and P. R. Furman's "Saardamski plotnik" (1847) as examples. The authors analyze the typological similarities in Masalsky's and Furman's depictions of Tsar Peter, which are determined by the desire, characteristic of historical fiction of this period, to recreate the image of a national hero who embodies the fundamental axiological vectors of the time in his deeds. The study demonstrates how this cultural-historical and artistic-aesthetic task was accomplished through the choice of the narrator-historiographer and the composition of the character-image, as well as the functioning of archetypical imagery in the plot organization of the texts. Attention is paid to the specifics of intra-genre orientation and the increasing mythologization of the image of Peter I. The value and aesthetic vectors that formed in this period in Russian historical prose are analyzed from the standpoint of historical-cultural, comparative-typological and mythopoetic methods. The novelty of this study lies in its identification of methods for artistic and aesthetic representation of the historical figure of Tsar Peter: narration from the author's perspective; the enlargement of the hero's image through the compositional technique of optically juxtaposing the central historical figure with secondary and fictional characters. It has been revealed that the artistic embodiment of Peter I is accompanied by a "flickering" of archetypal imagery (the hero's transformation: stranger-carpenter-doctor-great sovereign; the plot of the return of the prodigal son) and his mythologization (the transformation of chaos into cosmos, Peter the demiurge, " Rossiya molodaya "). The narrative's intra-genre orientation contains features of the hagiographic genre (the hero's beauty, hard work, lifetime "miracles," and didactic speeches). The article suggests similarities in the image visualization techniques used in the battle paintings of A. V. Kotzebue and N. A. Zuyerweid and the battle and crowd scenes in Masalsky's " Byl’ 1703 goda." The works of Masalsky and Furman document features of a tendency characteristic of the development of Russian historical prose in the second quarter of the 19th century: a focus on the axiological dominant and the mythologization of the historical memory of the national hero.