Oronyms in Russian Poetry of the 18th Century: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis

The article analyzes the figurative-thematic features of the poetic system of Russian literature in the 18th century, related to oronyms. At the same time, it conducts an analysis of the motif of ascending a mountain as one of the key elements of the poetics of Russian classicism, specifically in the Pindaric ode of M. V. Lomonosov. The material for the quantitative study is the poetic subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NCRL) – consisting of 101,525 texts. At this stage of the work, we focus on works chronologically fitting within the years 1705–1801, comprising 3,109 texts. Their specificity is such that 1,076 texts fall within the period from 1705 to 1769, while 2,033 texts are from 1770 to 1801. An index of oronyms from the work of Ageeva R. A. was used as the oronym dictionary for calculation of frequency. Lemmatization with contextual disambiguation of homonymy in the analyzed texts was conducted automatically using the mystem package. Statistical estimates of the effects of the text creation time on the frequency of oronym usage, considering text length and genre, were made using Poisson regression. The qualitative analysis reveals that this semantic complex is a clear demonstration of the departure from literary tradition toward the search for new images and themes in the works of pre-Romantic writers. Furthermore, it is precisely through "mountain" images that the latent conflict between N. A. Lvov and M. V. Lomonosov is actualized, most explicitly manifested in the first's poem "Dobrynya," which in certain places directly addresses the invectives previously sounded by Sumarokov against Lomonosov. Quite clear conclusions from traditional analysis are quantitatively confirmed, at least based on the material from the National Corpus of the Russian Language. In particular, a decrease in the absolute number and frequency of mountain imagery in Russian poetry at the end of the 18th century has been identified. The question of the relationship between real and mythological toponyms within the confines of classical, sentimental, pre-Romantic, and light poetry remains open.