Reception of Henri de Regnier’s Poetry by Maximilian Voloshin and Igor Severyanin

Abstract

The article examines the reception of the poetry by a French poet Henri de Regnier in the works of Maximilian Voloshin and Igor Severyanin. Voloshin was a passionate promoter of Regnier in Russia; he appealed to him in criticism, translated his poems and prose, and considered him to be a forerunner of “neo-realism,” a new stage of development in European and Russian literature. The interest of Severyanin in the work of Regnier develops under the influence of Voloshin’s 1910 article “Henri de Regnier.” The young Severyanin was influenced by this article and used accurate translations of Regner’s two poems included in the article for his own translation experiments: he even made the same mistake as Voloshin when translating one of these poems. Compared to Voloshin’s, Severyanin’s versions are less accurate; they have stylistic shifts and ironic tones absent in the original. Thus, the example of Voloshin’s and Severyanin’s different attitudes to Regnier’s poetry allows me to trace two different tendencies in the reception of Western authors within the culture of the so-called Russian Silver age: enthusiastic discipleship, more typical for Russian symbolists, and stylistic play and ironic distancing, more typical for Russian futurists.

Keywords

• h. de regnier
• m. voloshin
• i. severyanin
• reception
• symbolism
• post-symbolism
• literary translation
• irony.