About the book: 2006 / Literary texts do not have the power to influence the process of formation of the literary canon, however, their strategies of self-positioning within the canon are amenable to reconstruction, and in some cases and deconstruction. These strategies involve the explicit or hidden use of tropes associated with the semantic field of health and illness, which, in turn, relate simultaneously to the body of the poet and to the text as a “poetic body” (corpus). The virulence of these processes increases in connection with the transformation of the “function of the author” (M. Foucault), which took place in the second half of the 18th century and is sometimes described as “the birth of the author” or even as the emergence of “a new type of text based on authorship, called literature.” A. S. Pushkin and V. K. Kuchelbecker participate in this process. Analysis of such participation is the task of this article..