Studia Humanitatis (Dec 2023)
The Amsterdam text in the poetry of the Russian emigration: Oleg Ilyinsky and Yuri Ivask
Abstract
Two leading Russian poets in American emigration portray Amsterdam as an otherness of New York, a more successful meeting place for intellectuals and workers than the one in the New World due to the picturesqueness of Holland life. Oleg Ilyinsky draws on the poetics of Mayakovsky; however, he thinks exclusively of the clash of elements, and of social life as a projection of that clash. Yuri Ivask in his philosophy of the game sees the element as a thin layer that is tested for authenticity by new encounters. Poets equally perceive both a critique of servile labour and a combination of landscape excess and the melancholy of the collector’s still life, through which a meaningful switch between the Old and the New World imagery is possible, in the images of Amsterdam.
