The paper studies the aspects of Russia’s image representation in “The Seasons”, a poem by the English sentimentalist J. Thomson, in the context of realization
of the Russian theme and the development of the Petrine myth in English poetry of the second half of the XVIII century. “The Russian text” of Thomson’s descriptive-didactic poem is analysed on the material of its final part (“Winter”, 1744 edition) in the aspect of comparing the hetero-image of Russia with the images of the English self and European “others”. Particular attention is paid to the influence of Thomson’s artistic method, representative of the poetics of “physico-theological” poets, on the construction of the image of Russia. We also dwell upon studying intertextual relations of Thomson’s poem with the works of D. Mallet and A. Hill (the main devices of making the image of Peter the Great are closely compared in the poems “The Seasons” and “The Northern Star”). The study concludes that Thomson adhered to the traditions of valorization of Russia’s image in the XVIII century English artistic consciousness and, at the same time, his imagological evaluation of Russia is ambivalent, as he saw Russia oscillating between the poles of barbarity and civilization.
For citation: Polyakov O.Yu. The Russian theme in J. Thomson’s poem “The Seasons”, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2025, iss. 4, pp. 21—31.