DOI 10.52172/2587-6945_2021_18_4_60
Abstract
The work examines poems and behavioral reactions of the famous Russian actor A. S. Yakovlev at the turn of the 18th –19th centuries through the prism of the «history of emotions». The attention of the author of the article is focused on such an «incident» as «someone else's happiness» and his own misfortune – the phenomena that Yakovlev, as a poet, constantly writes about and Yakovlev, as an actor and man, talks about. An «incident» is defined as something unusual, sharply individual in the life, behavior and creative activity of a person. All the memoirists persistently repeat the idea of the fatal influence on Yakovlev's life of his unrequited and painful love for a certain married actress, with whom he, apparently, more than once played scenes of love, married life, jealousy, etc. on the stage of the theatre. In a number of his poems, quite epigonous and amateurish, but filled with sincere feelings, Yakovlev more than once wishes happiness to the newlyweds, be it his friend and his wife or Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich and his bride, Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna. When the actor and poet talks about himself, he describes his love sufferings and misfortunes. Much suggests that life, literature and theater were an indissoluble whole for Yakovlev, that the roles he played, the lyrical genres he loved and the emotions characteristic of them, his own lonely life of a rejected lover – all this determined his desire for suffering and unhappiness, on the one hand, attention and increased interest in someone else's happiness, on the other.
Keywords
The history of feelings and emotions, happiness, misfortune, suffering, microhistory, actor A. S. Yakovlev, amateur poetry, epithalamion, theatrical and literary culture of the turn of the 18th –19th centuries.