Article

Name: «The Ode to the Wind» by I. F. Zhdanov in cultural and historical perspective

Authors: Chizhov Nikolay Sergeevich, Komarov Sergey Anatolyevich

Tyumen State University, Tyumen, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: The paper presents an ideological, topical and genre analysis of one of the key poetic texts by I. F. Zhdanov, a widely recognized contemporary Russian poet, born in the Altai Region. The analysis is conducted from the standpoint of the poem`s relevance to the cultural and historical tradition. As a result of the analysis it was found that, firstly, by its strophic construction «The Ode to the Wind» goes back to the text «Borodino» by M. Yu. Lermontov and belongs to the same odic stanza tradition. The text by Lermontov is perceived as a fateful battle for the resto-ration of universal arrangement and as realization of the aesthetic form connecting the past and the present and historically tested by mass consciousness. Via the aesthetic form one sets the pro-cess for transformation of oneself and of the world, filled up with allusions to other literary topics. Secondly, the paper shows in great detail that I. F. Zhdanov raises the theme of relationships be-tween the lyrical subject and the wind, raised by P. B. Shelley in «The Ode to the West Wind» (translated by Boris Pasternak ) and F. I. Tyutchev in «Why do you howl, the night Wind?» to a radically new level of solving it. This topic gets a fundamentally new vision and perspective by Zhdanov. The lyrical subject not only realizes the infernal nature of the wind and casts a spell on it like in poetry by F. I. Tyutchev, but the subject is involved in interaction with the wind through a ritual and mythological act aimed at cosmogonical recovery to the original state of the world plunged in chaos. Thirdly, it is revealed that due to the ritual context in «Ode to the wind» there is a case of genre syncretism which combines elegiac and hymnal (odic) features that are well-balanced in the texts by the English romantic poet and the Russian classic poets. These fea-tures act as a constructive force of a united mysterial process which involves not only the subject and the world, but also the author and readers.

Keywords: i. f. zhdanov, elegy, ode, ritual, wind, genre, myth, mirror

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