The Poetic Heritage of Maximilian Voloshin and Buddhism

Abstract

The article is aimed at revealing how the poetic heritage of Maximilian Voloshin represents the translation of the Buddhist constants. Several tasks have been accomplished to achieve this goal. There is identified a set of texts containing references to Buddhist constants. These texts are grouped and characterized in terms of what kind of Buddhist ideas they translate. There is revealed a set of maxims of Buddhist understanding of the world actual for the poet and the typological methods of their translation. All the main poetic texts of Voloshin, except for his youthful poems and signatures to watercolors, served as the material for the work. To achieve the goal and objectives, the authors used semantic, comparative and intertextual analysis which made it possible to detect unambiguous correspondences between the content of certain semantic complexes of Buddhist texts and Voloshin’s poetic texts. The semantic analysis of the poetic heritage of Maximilian Voloshin, carried out at various levels, allows stating with a high degree of confidence that Buddhism occupies an essential place among the poet’s aesthetic and ideological orientations; that it is perceived by him as an invariably relevant component of the world culture and an individually oriented perception of the world. It is manifested in the fact that many texts of different genre content contain direct and indirect references to the constants of Buddhist perception of the world. The totality of these references forms a model of perception of reality, which demonstrates the opposite of the stereotypes of European rationalism. It is found that the functions of references to Buddhist constants are not limited to direct isolated nominations or purely pictorial tasks; they play a much broader and more significant role. They are one of the components of creativity that determines its overall structure and reveals the essential features of the perception of the world by the poet. The organic inclusion of the constants of Buddhist perception of the world in the texts shows not only their deep understanding, but also that they were in the active field of the comprehension of the poet.

Keywords

• maximilian voloshin
• buddhism
• ambivalence
• the act of creation
• silence
• fire
• emptiness
• reincarnation
• man