Филологический класс (Oct 2021)
Interpretation of the Image of Home in the Collection of Poems by V. F. Khodasevich “By The Way of Grain”
Abstract
The article presents an interpretation of the image of home in V. F. Khodasevich’s collection of poems “By the Way of Grain”. The author traces the archetypal nature and evolution of this symbol in relation to the image of the dying and resurrecting grain, which is the compositional center of artistic unity. It is proved that the semantic structure of the image of home in “By the Way of Grain” is largely saturated with connotations inherited from the myths of the Eastern Slavs, as well as some biblical allusions. The study shows that the semantic content of the motif of the lost destroyed house, which is the key image in the poems “Tears of Rachel”, “November 2”, “The Home”, is associated with the development of the symbolist tradition. Moreover, in the poems “November 2” and “The Home” Khodasevich conducts a creative dialogue with the poems of Alexander Pushkin “The Bronze Horseman” and “The House in Kolomna”. Eventually, he comes up with the idea of building a human habitat, harmonized and spiritualized by a woman, the keeper of the hearth (poems “Without Words”, “The Loaves of Bread”). In the poem “Without Words”, it is the silent heroine, the creator of a cozy homely atmosphere that prompts the lyrical subject with the idea of the power of God’s providence, returning him to saving faith in the Creator. In the poem “The Loaves of Bread” Khodasevich uses the ekphrasis technique in an original way, filling it with light humor. The poet somehow brings the “homely” and purely earthly event of baking bread into the plot of the European religious painting, referring the image of the beautiful “housewife”, depicted in the picture, to the world of God. It is no coincidence that the heroine bakes bread, surrounded by angels, who carefully help her, and the entire space of the house is permeated with bright mystical light. The hymn to the woman-hostess who keeps the hearth, created in the poem “The Loaves of Bread”, to a certain extent goes back to the poetic “wisdom” of Pushkin, expressed in “An Excerpt from Onegin’s Journey”. At the same time, in this work, Khodasevich offers his own version of the artistic embodiment of “Eternal Femininity”, which is controversial to the ideas of his contemporaries, first of all, Russian Symbolists.
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