The ode “Evening Reflection on God’s Majesty in the Case of the Great Northern Lights” by M. V. Lomonosov: Structural and rhetorical features

The purpose of the study is to identify the structural and rhetorical features of the spiritual ode “Evening Reflection on God’s Majesty in the Case of the Great Northern Lights” by M. V. Lomonosov. The ode was completely published in “The Brief Guide to the Environment” in 1747 as a part of the third chapter “On the Location of Syllogism”, placed in a third part “On the Location”. The scientific novelty of the study consists in identifying and describing the language units of M. V. Lomonosov’s ode, allowing to qualify the text both as a poetic work and as a scientific treatise. M. V. Lomonosov develops the “physico-theological” tradition that formed when science and religion were combined, describes a natural phenomenon characteristic of the northern latitudes (the northern lights) in poetic language and expounds a theory about its electrical nature. The article analyzes the structure and plot of the ode, as well as the artistic and rhetorical devices used by the poet. The results showed that the ode “Evening Reflection”, on the one hand, is an example of an abbreviated syllogism, an enthymeme (spreading the idea of night, the world and the northern lights), on the other hand, serves as a model for demonstrating tropes and rhetorical figures characteristic of M. V. Lomonosov’s individual style.