On the Pushkin text in the poetry of Perestroika

Abstract

This article is devoted to Perestroika poets referring to the Pushkin text as a ‘tuning fork’ in reconfiguring poetics. The study aims to show that, in this case, intertextual connection create a special text-within-a-text. The corpus, intertextual, and compositional methods are used to analyse Pushkin-invoking texts by Yuri Arabov, Vladimir Druk, Timur Kibirov, and other poets. It is concluded that these authors perceive Pushkin’s poetry as a lexicon whose units can be used for building countless cycles of poetic reflections on the world as well as on poetry and the role of the poet. The donor text is an interlinear gloss for the recipient text. The implicit ‘alien’ and the explicit ‘own’ words merge into a single text. Perestroika poets inherit from Pushkin polystylism, a propensity to parody when analysing cultural codes and prece­dent texts, and fundamental dialogicity. Particular attention is paid to variations on the theme of Pushkin's ‘Monument’ as well as the symbolism of his name, which turned into somewhat of a common noun used to refer to any poet. The predominance of allusions to quotes in references to Pushkin points to the desire of perestroika poets engage in an equal dialogue with the national genius. At the same time, the Pushkin text becomes for them the point at which the semantic perspective of both a concrete poetic utterance and poetry as a whole is refracted.

Keywords

• pushkin
• intertextuality
• allusion
• quote
• 20th-century poetry
• poetic text analysis