Article

Name: The act of creativity and its role in Sergey Gandlevsky’s poetics

Authors: Yurii V. Shatin

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the problem of a creative act and the manner of presenting it in the process of artistic writing by Sergey Gandlevsky. Following the basic postulate of conceptualism, the poet creates a strong reflective field of the text, where the source material is pushed into the background and in the center is the very process of scripting, which forms a poetic plot. At the same time, unlike the poetics of the most radical conceptualists, Gandlevsky’s poems contain a number of features that go beyond the paradigm characteristic of that direction. Among such features is the violation of the traditional distribution of functions of the lyrical hero and the biographical author. While the intention of the former is turned into eternity and infinity, the author, on the other hand, is immersed in the Soviet and post-Soviet life and is limited by his discourse. The interweaving of the author’s figure with the everyday context determines lyrical motifs. The article describes in detail the functioning of Gandlevsky’s mortal motif, when the fact of death loses its existential significance and is experienced as a wholly phenomenological act. Abandoning the basic principle of conceptualism — the prohibition of lyrical expression, the poet creates a special artistic unity, which he defines as critical sentimentalism.

Keywords: Gandlevsky, conceptualism, act of creativity, mortal motifs

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