Olga S. Kochetkova, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, Faculty of Philology, Peoples’ Friendship University, Miklukho-Maklaya Street, 6, 117198, Moscow, Russia; Literature Teacher of Higher Category, Letovo School, Zimenkovskaya Street, 3, Kommunarka District, 108802, Moscow, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7182-8385
The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the poem “Literary Hell” which was first published in the author’s edition in 2023. A study of the key images (a tramway, a green star, the death, a snow flower of the life etc.) and motifs (Christmas, childhood, memory, singing, fear etc.) allows us to reconstruct both the literary and historical-everyday context as well as to identify the subtexts of the poem and to raise the question of Boris Poplavsky’s creative dialogue not only with symbolist and avant-garde poets but also with the representative of Acmeism Osip Mandelstam. The article examines how the principle of “semantic reflections” is realized at different levels of the text, which explains such a feature of Poplavsky’s poetics, inherited by him from Mandelstam, as the hieroglyphic nature of the poetic word. Poplavsky’s poetry is built on anagrammatic and linguistic experiments, metabolas, a specific system of associative and intuitive connections, oppositions of images and motifs that distinguish his artistic world from Mandelstam’s one. However, the tragic worldview, the “borderline” perception of life in the light of the “green star”, determines that general “mystical note” that returns Poplavsky to Mandelstam’s “word”.
Boris Poplavsky; Osip Mandelstam; “Literary Hell”; context; subtext; comparative analysis.
10.08.2025
08.09.2025
Kochetkova, O.S. “The Poem ‘Literary Hell’ by Boris Poplavsky in the Author’s Edition: About the Dialogue of the ‘Orpheus of Russian Montparnasse’ and Osip Mandelstam”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 4(70), 2025, pp. 126‒146. (In Russ.)
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