Vestnik Pravoslavnogo Svâto-Tihonovskogo Gumanitarnogo Universiteta: Seriâ III. Filologiâ (Dec 2021)
To the understanding of W. B. Yeats’s literary biography and imagery
Abstract
This article presents W. B. Yeats’s work in two contexts, namely that of the British poetry at the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries and of its dynamics, and that of literary symbolism in general. In polemics with the stereotypes of Soviet and Post- Soviet English studies, the author off ers his understanding of European and American literary symbolism, of its variants (covering the 1870–1920s), including the English variant and its development (from late Romanticism and “Aestheticism” to various “Modernisms”), as well as the understanding of the range of main issues in symbolism, actualised mainly by Nietzsche and his claim that “God is dead” together with his “reevaluation of all values” rather than the French fi n de si?cle poets. The article introduces an original outline (for the Russian audience) of Yeats’s literary biography and then, in its reflection, a line-by-line analysis of The Second Coming (1919) as a particularly symbolist poem. The author argues that this poem, seemingly Christian in imagery, turns out to be implicitly anti-Christian and is about the “Other Coming”, which is parallel to Aleksandr Blok’s poem The Twelve.
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