English Romanticism Novel: Unknown and Known to the Russian Reader

For a Russian reader English Romanticism is associated with poetry. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and Robert Southey, George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Walter Scott are those ones who mirrored the epoch, created new forms and contents of the rhymed word, changed readers’ attitude to poetry. Romanticism poetic genres were translated into Russian as soon as they were written and, even nowadays, new English Romantic poetry translations regularly appear both in print and online. As for prosaic genres, the situation is different. Romanticism essays, periodical reviews, epistolary heritage (letters, diaries, memoirs, etc.) are generally known to literary critics, historians, and experts in the field. Novelists, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley, are popular among contemporary readers, but not as Romanticism authors. University scholars, lecturers and students are acquainted with some Romanticism novelists, among whom Charles Maturin, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas De Quincey, Edward Bulwer-Lytton could be enlisted. English authors of the Gothic and Jacobian novel writers are defined as Pre-Romanticism authors and read episodically. A rare reader knows that poets, George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote Gothic novels, and that Romanticism prose is as voluminous as poetry. Globalisation processes have opened more Romanticism pages to the readers both in English and translated from English. The question is still open if the Romanticism novel is authentically attractive to the reader or should be synchronised with the contemporary problems and plots. Another question of the Romanticism heritage mystery is why it is regularly discussed, analysed and re-read by every new generation with genuine excitement of the direct heirs or remote explorers. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.