From imitation to refutation: The canonisation and decanonisation of the metaphor of a poetic monument in Russian literature

Аннотация

The article is devoted to studying the metaphor of poetry as an immaterial construction through the reception of Ho-race's Ode 3.30 in Russian literature (from Derzhavin and Pushkin to Bryusov, Mayakovsky, Khodasevich, Brodsky, Zakhoder and Purin, whose works have not been analysed before). The study of monument poetry leads to singling out its characteristic features: the dominating motif of the words of poetry as forming a more abiding monument than stone or bronze (which can potentially incur an egocentricity on the part of the poet); intertextuality ranging from allusion and direct quotation to bricolage, pastiche and parody; the unfolding of the basic metaphor through spatial and temporal perspectives. Pushkin's poem can be viewed as the source of the immense popularity of Horace's ode in Russia, which is incomparably greater than in the literature of other nations. Pushkin's own challenge to the canonical treatment of the metaphor is directed not only at Horace's but also at Derzhavin's poem, with which the canonization of the verbal monument tradition began in Russian literature. Subsequent polemic responses, including those of Bryusov and Mayakovsky, are invariably directed at Pushkin's poem, confrming its continuous presence in the collective memory of Russian-speaking nations. Later responses in what became a tradition tend to employ forms of parody that challenge or transform rather than destroy the verbal monument metaphor, maintaining it as an open system potentially available to postmodernistic literature, “defamiliarising” it through the prism of travesty, as in Brodsky's poem, or of irony, as in Khodasevich's or Zakhoder's parodies, or of bricolage, as in Purin's verse, whose success remains open to further challenge.