Article

Name: Stanzas: from motive to the genre. The fate of the genre memory of Pushkin’s motive “the poet and the power” in the poetry of B. Pasternak and O. Mandelstam of the 1930s

Authors: Yu. 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

In the section Study of literature

Abstract:

The paper considers the role of a motive in genre-generating processes of the Russian poetry of the 19−20th centuries. It is known that along with established genres with sharp structural at- tributes, some forms could be found which have certain potentials but did not become genre for- mations. Stanzas are included in a number of such forms. When discussing stanzas, we are not concerned with syntactic attributes but with certain semantics defined by poetic tradition.

In Russian poetry, this tradition originated from Pushkin’s “Stanzas” (1826) and extended in the poem “K druz’yam” (“To friends”) (1827). The semantics of both poems is related to the mo- tive of the dialogue between the poet and the governor. It differs significantly from the semantics of the solemn ode by two attributes: a) the affirmation of the equality between the poet and the governor in the dialogue; b) the direction of the dialogue towards the future.

Without any noticeable development in the 19th-century poetry, this motive was in demand in the 1930s, as expressed in the works of B. Pasternak and O. Mandelstam. In the poem “Stolet’e s lishnim – ne vchera...” (“More than a century ago – not yesterday”), Pasternak refers to the allu- sions of Pushkin’s “Stanzas” and gives them a different meaning. Pushkin’s “Glyadet’ vpered bez boyazni” (“Looking forward without fear”) is some kind of future without any doubts. How- ever, for Pasternak, it is a temptation that led to a dead end “pri vstreche s umstvennoyu len’yu” (“when faced with mental laziness”).

The fate of the motive becomes more complicated in Mandelstam’s work. Beginning with harsh anti-Stalin injection “My zhivem, pod soboyu ne chuya strany...” (“We live without feeling the country behind us...”) (1933), the poet rewrites spiritual and creative evolution later. “Stan- zas” (1935) is a result of this evolution, describing the necessity of dealing with Stalin’s regime. In the next poem with the nominal title “Oda Stalinu” (“Ode to Stalin”) (1937), Mandelstam re- turns stanzas of a solemn ode attributes with a required distance between a poet and a governor.

Keywords: B. Pasternak, O. Mandelshtam, stanzas, motive, genre

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