The image of Scotland in Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry

The article examines the image of Scotland in Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry as a special poetic space that combines personal ancestral memory, cultural and historical associations, and a romantic myth. The poems “The Coffin of Ossian” and “Desire” are analyzed, where Scotland is not only the land of the poet’s ancestors but also a symbol of spiritual freedom, a lost ideal, and a sacred inspiration. The focus on Scottish themes is interpreted as a form of self-identification and a search for inner kinship with the heroic and poetic past. Through the motifs of fog, hills, ancestral castles, the harp, and the sword, the romantic theme of the “imaginary homeland” is revealed, contrasting with the cold and indifferent Russia. Lermontov perceives Scotland not in an ethnographic sense, but in an existential one – as a lost spiritual center, the homeland of the soul, a place where harmony and rebirth are possible. In the poet’s imagination, Scotland becomes a symbol of a “different world” and an ideal that the lyrical hero strives for but remains unattainable. Thus, the image of Scotland serves as a cultural and mythological construct, as well as a personal archetype that reflects the poet’s tragic duality between reality and dreams, between “native” and “alien”.

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