ABOUT RECKLESSNESS AND NOT ONLY ABOUT IT (O.GOLDSMITH’S POETIC MINIATURES ABOUT LOVE)
Authors: Potnitseva T.N. 
Published: November 2019

The paper focuses on two poetic miniatures about love by the English writer of the XVIII th century O.Goldsmith. These miniatures embody the specificity of the writer’s manner and the main artistic and ideological tendencies of the time. That specificity finds its expression first of all in the mixture of different styles and pathos – serious and playful. All that scholars correlate not only with Goldsmith’s individual manner but with the aesthetic of rococo. The interest to Goldsmith’s art is growing nowadays. That is proved by an amount of investigations, dissertations appeared recently. But what concerns the Ukrainian literary studies one must admit a fair and sad conclusion of D Chik that the creative art of Goldsmith has not been yet a special object of investigation in Ukraine. Though his name and his works where always touched upon in the context of many Ukrainian investigations of the literature of the XVIIIth century. The priority of the Dnipro University school of the scholars studying the European literary XVIIIthe c. is certain. The both verses deal with the specific aspect of love located outside the borders of “legalized proprieties” but which are so attractive for the author’s attention due to many causes more than any other of the common “morally steadfast plots” about love. The poems are similar in an obvious two-sided depiction, in an exquisite playfulness which attributes them both with the style of rococo. Here the female’s or mistress’s qualities and properties are praised but they are those which according to the logic of things had to cause only conviction. And thus a demonstrated intention of moralizing turns into joke. The poems chosen for the analysis embody the author’ s idea about microcosm of a man’s existence where there are its own “crazy laws” and where it is possible to have fun and not to be pessimistic, according to D.Zatonsky’s judgment, in one’s reflection about “ sins of men’s attitude to the life”, and where it is possible “to reject decisively regulations and respectability”. All that, without any doubt, made Goldsmith a forerunner of Romanticism. The joking verses about love includes in themselves, as it is seen, much of what goes beyond the borders of the topic chosen by Golsmith. “A lovely woman” turns out to be a concretized image of a common recognizable man, one of those «good people all of every sort», for whom so often the writer appeals and whom he loves and sympathizes with so much. In investigating the diversity of a man’s essence Goldsmith revealed some common rules of existence and in different forms of his art the writer thought about that. In the paradoxical encounter of the serious and the comic in the plot of the poetic miniatures as well as in the style Goldsmith embodies in his own way his perception and adoption of a human being what he is with all his weak sides and faults. The playful component of the XVIIIth century writers’ poetry and Goldsmith poetry included is a sign of a free breathing of a poetic soul which rejects all stereotypes and “rules” as exhausted to the full. The idea of frailty of life and its finiteness no matter how lofty the man’s aspirations could be is transformed in the poetry of a great mockingbird. The poems quite contrary are full of life and life-affirming pathos. Not rejecting the very thought about man’s mortality Goldsmith calls for a life acceptance in all its appearances. And this call is embodied in the form of a mischievous game. Goldsmith’s conversation with his reader at that is a sign of a boiling vital energy.